LIBRARYW CONGRESS. 
: ®§Hit..:.._._;(30pijn5{jt I^u 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Faith and Science; 



OK, 



HOW REVELATION AGREES WITH 
REASON, AND ASSISTS IT. 



(<5 



HENRY F.^\BROWNSON. 



Ipsa fide qua credit sanatur ut intelligat ampliora. 

St. Aug. En. in Ps. cxviii, S. xviiL 




.^9i^ 



H. F. BROWNSON, 

35 WEST CONGRESS STREET. 
1895. 



3-, 



i:ntered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1895, by.- 

HEXBY F. BSOWNSOy, 
In the Office of the Uhrarian of Congress at Washimjon, D. Q 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

Prologue - - ... 5 

Chapter I. The Problem - - 9 

II. Synthetic Philosophy 20 

III. The Thomist and the 

Synthetic Philosophy 67 

IV. Ration ALiSM.^ - - 95 
V. Revelation - - 134 

VI. Faith and Science: - 170 
Index 217 



PROLOGUE, 

Our age has no great relish for the higher 
philosophical studies, and apparently no great 
capacity to pursue them with any marked suc- 
cess. Its authors seek popularity, and philo- 
sophical studies can never be popular. Philos- 
ophy loses in depth and solidity just in proxDor- 
tion as it is taken out of the schools and submit- 
ted to the judgment of the multitude. The re- 
sults of the profoundest philosophy are needed 
by the people and may be given them ; but never 
can the people be so educated as to be able to 
follow and understand the processes by which 
these results are obtained. In philosophy, as in 
all the special sciences, the few must think for 
the many. The democratic principle is not of 
universal application, and truth and falsehood, 
any more than right and wrong, cannot be set- 
tled by a iDlurality of votes. The great want of 
the people, collectively as individually, is to be 
taught and governed. Their real good, their 
real interests, are always to be consulted and 
labored for, in obedience to the second great 
commandment, ^Thou shalt love tky neighbor 



6 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

as thyself;" but the doctrine now so prevalent, 
that all is to be done by the people and nothing 
for them, or that every man is to be his own 
teacher, law-giver, priest, and king, belongs to 
that false order of thought with which Satan 
seduced our first parents, and which was re- 
vived and proclaimed as the pure gospel of 
Christ, the Lord, by the so-called reformers of 
the sixteenth century. 

The good of the people in this life and in that 
which is to come depends on their apprehension 
and application of those great, immutable, and 
universal principles in accordance with which 
all things are created, directed, and governed, 
and which can be known and reduced to prac- 
tice in the several departments of life only as 
sup ernatur ally revealed, and as explained and 
set forth in their order by those who are fitted 
for this work by their special studies. Eevela- 
tion, of course, supposes reason, and there can 
be no theology, or science of revelation, with- 
out philosophy, or the science of reason. Neither 
science is possible by itself alone, for the two 
are but integral parts of one whole. Hence, 
where there is no science of reason, or philoso- 
phy, there is no theology; faith disappears, and 
religion degenerates either into a more or less 
gross superstition, or into a simple affection of 



PROLOGUE. 7 

man's emotional nature, as we see it does with 
the Methodists and other pietistic sects; and 
where there is no theology there is no philos- 
ophy, no science of reason, and reason itself 
grows feeble, gets bewildered, and falls into all 
manner of vagaries, wild and incoherent theo- 
ries, intricate and frail as cobwebs, as we see in 
the speculations or generalizations of contem- 
porary scientists like Darwin, Huxley, Lub- 
bock, and others. It is only through theology 
that the principles and truths of reyelation are 
«et forth in their real order and relations, and 
applied to the needs of social and individual 
life; and it is by the aid of philosophy, or the 
science of reason, in its highest and purest form, 
that theology is constructed from revealed data. 
Who, then, can fail to see that to construct the- 
ology, or the science of revelation, or philoso- 
phy, or the science of reason, requires special 
studies and special aptitudes which are not pos- 
sible in the case of the multitude, even if edu- 
cated to the fullest extent practicable? Yet the 
results of the profoundest science of either en- 
ter into the child's catechism and are neces- 
sary to be known and observed by all men. We 
see, then, that while thelogical and philosophi- 
cal sciences are needed for the instruction and 
benefit of the many, their cultivation and con- 



o FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

struction must be the work of the few who alone 
can understand their problems and fathom 
their processes. 

I make these remarks, perhaps not nnnecessa- 
ry, when and where eyerr rustic fancies that he 
is able to instruct the sage whose life has been 
devoted to the acquisition of science and wisdom,, 
by way of apology for introducing a discussion 
which will be long and uninteresting, if not un- 
intelligible, to a large majority of readers, 



FAITH AND SCIENCE 



CHAPTER I. 



THE PROBLEM. 



Truth is eternal; principles are universal 
and unchanigeable ; but our subjectiye under- 
standing of tliem and the application of them 
to the practical life of individuals and nations 
varies from age to age, from nation to nation, 
and even from individual to individual. The so- 
lutions of the problems of universal life ade- 
quate to the wants of one age cease to 
be adequate to the wants of another, and must, 
from time to time, be revised or renewed, or 
the human race falls into intellectual and moral 
anarchy; ceases to advance, and returns to bar- 
barism. 



10 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

The need of new solutions, or, rather, new 
applications of the old, seldom, perhaps never^ 
grows out of what is called progress, or the 
march of mind, of which so much in our times 
is said, and not always mselj said; but, ordi= 
narily at least, out of the obscuration of intel- 
lect and consequent feebleness of character^ 
which render the old solutions partially or 
wholly unintelligible and too difficult for prac- 
tice. That the human race, upon the whole, or 
taken in the entire series of ages which it tray- 
erses, is progressiye, adyances towards perfec- 
tion, or the fulfilment of the diyine purpose in 
its existence, is undoubtedly true, and it would 
.be impious to question it; but not all changes 
are for the better, and in particular ages and 
nations it seems to decline and, so to speak, to 
march backwards, not forwards. Xations fall 
as well as rise; solitude reigns where once stood 
cities, and barbarous tribes roam oyer the sites 
of empires once renowned for their arts and 
science, their learning and polish, their indus- 
try and commerce, their political power and 
grandeur. Euins coyer the face of the earth as 
well as new erections, and not seldom disorder 
succeeds to order, weakness to strength, igno- 
rance to intelligence, superstition to religion, 
barbarism to ciyilization. Xo, the old solutions 



THE PROBLEM. 11 

do not cease to satisfy because the world lias 
out^own them, or because too learned and 
wise, or too advanced to accept them; it is 
rather because the new generations have be- 
come too small to fit them or too little disci- 
plined to be able to live in them, and can no 
more use them than they can wear the heavy 
plate armor or wield the sword of the warriors 
of the middle ages. 

In western Europe intelligence and general 
culture were, from the commencement of the 
sixth century to the end of the tenth, far below 
what they were in the first four centuries of 
our era, and it is doubtful if the race has even 
yet regained the heights it had reached before 
the northern barbarians overran the Roman 
empire and seated themselves on its ruins. In 
no nation is civilization the work of a day, and 
in all it has so many obstacles of every sort to 
overcome and is so liable to so many and so 
frequent interruptions both from within and 
from without that ages on ages roll away with 
scarcely a perceptible advance.. This age could 
hardly produce the "Summa Contra Gentiles" 
of St, Thomas, and that work, admirable as it 
is, is inferior to the "De Civitate Dei" of St. 
Augustine. The mediaeval doctors are inferior 
to the great fathers, and our theolooians and 



12 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

pMlosophers are inferior to the mediaeval doc- 
tors. 

The need of revising the old solutions and 
adapting them to the wants of the new age that 
comes up grows undoubtedly out of the changes 
in mental and moral culture brought about by 
the vicissitudes of time and space. The prob- 
lems are always the same and the principle of 
their solution is always the same ; but the prob- 
lems coming up under new forms or new as- 
pects are not generally seen to be the same, nor 
are the old solutions seen to solve them under 
these new forms and aspects except by the few 
who make the subject a special study. The 
Hegelians are hardly aware that they only re- 
vive some of the forms of defunct gnosticism 
and only transfer to the West the Buddhism of 
the East; and it is doubtful if IMr. Herbert Spen- 
cer has reflected that he is only trying to gal- 
vanize into life the long-since exjiloded doc- 
trines of Leucippus and Democritus, Epicurus 
and Protagoras, or seen that their refutation 
by Plato and Aristotle and the Christian fathers 
and doctors is equally a refutation of his own 
atomical theories which explain all the phe- 
nomena of life by mechanical, chemical and 
electrical action; nay, most likely has understood 
as little of that refutation as the child unborn. 



THE PROBLEM. 13 

These changes in our point of view, in the forms 
or aspects under which things present them- 
selves, and which are ever-recurring, explain 
why theology and philosophy, in the respect 
that they are human sciences, do not and can- 
not take a fixed and permanent form, and why 
the work of the theologian and philosopher has 
to be renewed with each succeeding age and is 
a work ever beginning and never ending. 

There is no lack of reverence for the past in 
seeking to adapt the <3ld solutions to the wants 
of our age, if we do it, as we should, on the as- 
sumption that the new solutions are demanded 
hj the changes which take place, not necessa- 
rily by the progress alleged to have been effect- 
ed. It is natural that men who have mastered 
the problems and their solutions under the 
forms of a past age should be averse to any 
change in the form of the solutions, and it is 
equally natural that they who have done the 
same under the forms they assume in the pres- 
ent should take the new as an advance on the 
old, and denounce the adherents of the past 
as obscurantists, and applaud themselves as 
the friends of light and progress. Hence two 
parties spring up, the one called the party of 
the past and the other the party of the future, 
conservatives ajid radicals. The conservatives 



14 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

resist all changes in the forms of the solutions 
given to the old problems in their new forms 
or aspects, and the radicals, instead of under- 
standing that all that is needed is to adapt the 
old solutions to the problems as they now come^ 
lip, insist that the past knew nothing of the mat- 
ter and that absolutely new solutions are de- 
manded. Each party, taken exclusively in the 
sense of its dominant tendency, breaks the con- 
tinuity of life; the conservative by severing the 
connection of the past with the future, and the 
radical by severing the connection of the fu- 
ture with the past. Yet the quarrel is unneces- 
sary, and would be avoided if both parties were 
to become aware that nothing is either needed 
or permissible but the adaptation of principles 
that never change and have always been re- 
ceived to the new forms or aspects under which 
the old problems with the changes of time and 
place come up. 

Providence assigns each nation and each age 
its own work, and we who live now and do 
well the work demanded by our age and nation 
have no superiority to those great and good men 
who went before us ; nay, may be far inferior to 
them in absolute merit. The "Summa Contra 
Gentiles'' was a better book for the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries than was the "De Civ° 



THE PROBLEM. IS 

itate Dei," but not so good a book for the fourth 
and fifth, centuries; nor, considered without ref-^ 
erence to the age, so great a work. No man is 
to suppose that because he may do the work 
given him better than it was done in the past 
he must be superior to those who did equally 
well the work which was assigned them to do. 
He will show himself very inferior to them if 
he fails to honor and reverence them as his su- 
periors. It were too much for any man living 
to imagine that he can be to the world what 
Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Gregory the 
Great, or St. Thomas is; but it is no foolish am- 
bition for men now living to aspire to be to this 
age w^hat those men were to their respective 
ages. Every theologian and philosopher may, 
and, indeed, should so aspire. 

Without acceptiujg in its full extent the pos- 
itivist or Saint-Simonian notion that the pres- 
ent is an age of moral and intellectual anarchy 
because there has ceased to exist a moral and 
scientific doctrine fitted to command the assent 
of all intelligences and the love of all hearts, 
we may still say that there is great confusion 
of thought and much moral and intellectual dis- 
order, and which can be healed by bringing out 
a doctrine and presenting it to all minds so as 
to command general assent and ready obedi- 



16 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

ence. There certainly is discord in the intel- 
lectual and moral life of* onr age. Keason and 
faith, science and revelation, conseryatisni and 
progress, authority and liberty, are not harmo- 
nized in the preyailing doctrines of the day, are 
regarded to a great extent as antagonistic 
terms, as necessarily irreconcilable, and union 
and peace between their resi^ectiye adherents 
as utterly impossible. He who embraces the 
one term, it is held, can do so only by repelling 
the other. 

There is really, and many people say there 
is, no necessary antagonism between them, but 
few see that it is so, and fewer still show it to 
the understanding. The truth of what is said 
is yery seldom clearly apprehended or inwardly 
felt to be truth. There is no honest denying 
that it is yery generally felt that he who be- 
lieyes rejects reason, and that he who reasons 
is sure, if he has faith, to lose it; that he who 
asserts liberty denies authority; that he who 
defends the state denies the church, and he who 
defends the church denies the state; and that 
he who would cultivate science must abandon 
religion, and he who would retain religion must 
let go science. M. Proudhon only drew the logi- 
cal conclusion of the premises yery generally 
accepted and insisted on when he asserted that 



THE PROBLEM. 17 

God is a tyrant, and to maintain logically tlie 
liberty of man it is necessary to dethrone God 
and to deny totally liis existence. 

No doubt, for the Christian, both terms are 
sacred, and no doubt also that there is no real 
antagonism in the case, or that the antagonism 
which many so generally feel there is grows 
out of the unphilosophical character of modern 
thought. Yet in the actual state of men's un- 
derstanding there is the antagonism stated, and 
most Christians who think as well as belieye 
suffer from it in their own minds and hearts 
no less than do non-Chrietians. The evidence 
of it is found in the fact that they hold it more 
or less dangerous for believers to reason on the 
grounds of their faith, that they regard him 
who thinks boldly and freely on the difficulties 
presented in the revealed mysteries as in dan- 
ger of making shipwreck of his faith and of 
falling into mere rationalism, and that more 
men remain believers by force of will than by 
force of reason, and hold it more prudent to seek 
to surround faith in the young with the warm 
and tender associations of the heart and to en- 
list from the earliest moment the sentiments 
and affections and even prejudices in its favor^ 
than to confide its maintenance to intellectual 
culture and rational conviction. Certainly they 



18 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

hold tliat the antagonism is more apparent than 
realj and that the two terms are opposites or 
contraries rather than contradictories; but 
while they so hold and firmly maintain the two 
terms, or series of terms, are in reality recon- 
cilable, they do not themselyes perceiye, and 
much less set forth clearly, the ground on which 
they are or can be reconciled. 

I speak of Christian believers generally; but 
there is a well-known class of believers, called 
sometimes supematuralists, sometimes tradi- 
tionalists, sometimes theocrats, and sometimes 
absolutists and obscurantists, who seem to re- 
ject the whole rational series and to found sci- 
ence as well as sanctity and salvation on faith 
alone. They push nature aside to make way for 
^race, deny liberty to make way for authority, 
and demolish science to make way for faith. 
They are not inaptly described in a periodical 
published in the early part of the eighteenth 
century as "reasoning against reason, using 
reason against the use of reason, and some- 
times giving a pretty good reason why reason 
ought not to be used." They never can reduce 
their principle to practice, for it is only by rea- 
son that they can deny reason or restrict its 
freedom. However, by discarding nature they 
leave to gTace no subject, and by rejecting rea- 



, THE PROBLEM. 19 

son they render man incapable of receiving a 
revelation, as much so as a dog, a horse, or an 
ox. They do not get rid of antagonism; at best 
they "only create a solitude and call it peace." 
On the other hand, the positivists, rational- 
ists, naturalists, amongst v^hom must be reck- 
oned a large number of eminent names in the 
physical sciences, sometimes called the exact 
sciences for the reason, most likely, because 
they are not exact, imagine that they get rid of 
antagonism by refusing to recognize the series 
of terms insisted on by the super naturalists, 
and maintaining that reason and nature suffice 
for themselves, and then, when once we have 
got rid of superstition, priestcraft, and state- 
craft, refund to hearken to the theologians and 
metaphysicians, and planted our feet on the 
solid earth, we shall have scientific harmony 
and intellectual order, and the human race will 
pursue a course of uninterrupted progress, the 
waste places shall be built, springs of water 
shall break forth in the dry land, and the desert 
shall blossom as the rose. But they indulge in 
vain dreams, for exclusive naturalism, as will 
be shown hereafter, can no more suffice for it- 
self than exclusive supernaturalism. Who has 
not heard of what Kant calls the antinomies of 
reason? 



20 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

The two series of terms must be accepted, and 
neither can be surpressed without mining the 
other, and the problem is, the two terms being 
giyen, how to reconcile them, or how to harmon- 
ize them in our theological and philosophical 
systems so that they may be mutually as friend- 
ly in our understandings as they are in the real 
order? 



CHAPTEE II. 

SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 

'Before entering on the discus^on of the 
problem proposed in the previous chapter, it 
will be useful for the better comprehending of 
the argument, to explain briefly the principles 
of the philosophy on which it is based, and to 
show wherein they differ from those generally 
adopted. 

When Dr. Brownson began the systematic- 
exposition of his philosophical views in "The 
United States Democratic Review'^ (Brownson's 
Works, Vol. 1, p. 58), in 1842, he gave them the 
title of "Synthetic Philosophy." What he aimed 
at was a philosophy synthetic in its origin or 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 21 

starting-point, in its method, and in its conclu- 
sions. 

He therefore starts, as all philosophy mnst 
start, from thought; but instead of starting 
from the subject alone of thought, as do 
the psychologists, or from the object alone, 
as do the ontologists, he takes thought in its 
real synthesis of subject, object, and their nexus 
or relation. In his reasoning or philosophizing 
he used both synthesis and analysis, as all phi- 
losophers must do, but with him the synthesis 
controlled the analysis, and consequently in the 
conclusion he found a real synthesis presenting 
a whole with the several parts in their real re- 
lation and haying their meaning and their truth 
in that relation. All minds of the first order are 
synthetic and comprehend the parts in their re- 
lation to the whole; whilst inferior minds are 
analytical and comprehend the whole only in 
its parts. St. Thomas teaches that in propor- 
tion as the mind is of a higher order it compre- 
hends by fewer ideas, till we ascend to God, who 
comprehends by a single idea, and there is, as 
Balmes says, in the intellectual order a single 
truth which includes all others and from which 
they emanate. The synthesis aimed at is a real 
synthesis which presents things in their actual 
relations out of which they have no meaning 



22 FAITH AND SCIENCE/ 

and eyen no existence. All the pMlosopMcal 
and theological errors now so numerous and 
prevalent seem to grow ont of the studying and 
teaching of the truths of reason and of revela- 
tion, and reason and revelation themselves, the 
natural and the supernatural, as isolated facts, 
articles, or dogmas, without due reference to 
the catholic and universal principles which un- 
derlie them and are the principles alike of all 
existence and of all thought, without showing 
that all are connected with the whole and with 
one another, so that no one can be detached and 
denied without logically denying the whole. The 
synthesis constructed by the analytical method 
is merely a logical or abstract synthesis, of no 
more real value for the understanding of things 
in their principles than any other abstraction 
or mental conception. 

St. Paul and the early Christian fathers gen- 
erally may be classed as synthetic philosophers. 
The analytical method, in which the synthesis 
is secondary and factitious, first spread in Eu- 
rope about the beginning of the sixth century, 
when Boetius wrote his Dialogues and Com- 
mentaries on Pori3hyrT . Plato, soaring on the 
two wings of poetry and philosophy to the lof- 
tiest height ever reached by merely natural ge- 
nius, borrowing from other philosophers, es- 



f 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 23 

peciall}^ from Pythagoras and the east, but mak- 
ing whatever he borrowed his own by stamping 
it with the mark of originality, looked from a 
higher point of view upon the problems of the 
philosophers, and seizing the great principles 
underlying all thought and all existence, so far 
at least as they were accessible, embraced all 
in dialectic unity and harmony. He drew his 
arijgments indiscriminately from what is called 
pure reason, and from reason as he found it 
-modified or instructed b}' experience or tradi- 
tion. Aristotle, on the contrary, excelled in the 
power of analysis and distinction; was unsur- 
passed in the knowledge acquired from books 
and from obseryation. His chief object was the 
«tudy of nature, wherefore he discarded the 
ideal, and instead of proceeding like Plato from 
the universal to the particular, sought to at- 
tain by the particular to the universal, which 
consequently was only an abstract conception 
Msed on sensible experience and not on a real 
perception. 

The early fathers of the church made but 
slight account of the peripatetic or analytic 
method, as slight as they did of the Stoic and 
the Epicurean philosophies. Their higher es- 
teem for Plato on account of the greater har- 
monv of his doctrines with those of revelation 



24 FAITH AXD SCIEXCE. 

maT be noted in St. Jnstin, Athenagoras, Ori- 
gen, Clement of Alexandria, St. Angnstine, and 
generally in tliem all. The synthetic philoso- 
phy was better stiited to their purpose of de- 
fending Christianity as a whole against pagan- 
ism and of demonstrating the harmony of rea- 
son and reyelation. Later, the disptttes against 
the Monophysite, Monothelite, and other her- 
esies, and especially those against Arianism 
and Islam, required greater subtlety in the art 
of distinction and dialectics, and more consid- 
eration was given to Aristotle. It would seem 
from this that when Christianity is to be de- 
fended as a whole against paganism, the syn- 
thetic philosophy has been preferred and the 
analytic when it is a qtiestion of particular dog- 
mas. True, St. Thomas made use of it against 
the Arabs, but it was the only philosophy they 
accepted, and its use against them was very 
mtich of the nature of an argumentum ad hom- 
inem, and St. Thomas was clearly hampered 
by it, for his genius was eminently synthetic. 
We are now back where the early fathers fotmd 
themselves, so far as concerns the great dispute 
we are engaged in, for the very existence of rev- 
elation, as well as its harmony with reason, is 
the great qtiestion of this age. 

We see in our colleges able, learned, and pious 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. ^O 

;professors who devote tlieir lives to teaching for 
the love of God and the good of souls, and our 
young men, the pride of the land, on leaving 
college fallin^g' into contemporary rationalism 
and infidelity. While they remain at college 
under the care of these learned and revered pro- 
fessors, surrounded by all possible helps and 
appliances for the preservation of faith and the 
•cultivation of pious affections, there seems to 
be little danger; but when they come out, just 
at the period when the passions begin to unfold, 
and go forth into the world without any of the 
religious stimulants of the college, a large pro- 
portion of them wilt as the plant that has grown 
up in the shade wilts when exposed to the burn- 
ing rays of a summer sun. 

A serious defect in the education given is that 
too great a burden is imposed on the feeble faith 
of our age, and the reason of the pupil is not 
sufficiently pressed into its service; or, in other 
w^ords, the professors fail to show the relation 
between the great universal principles which 
underlie all the dogmas of faith and the uni- 
versal principles of reason, of all science, of all 
knowledge, and of all human belief. The phil- 
osophy they teach is not an adequate exponent 
of human reason, and therefore does not har- 
monize it throughout with the principles of 



26 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

faith, and the harmony asserted is rather as- 
serted than shown. The physical sciences 
taught are oftener theories, hypotheses, than 
sciences, and when not antajgonistic to revela- 
tion are nowhere shown to be in dialectic har- 
mony with it. So, in fact, the graduate goes 
forth into the world loying his religion, it may 
be, and determined to hold it fast, but with no 
reason for it but an external authority. The 
moment he finds it questioned he has no re- 
source but to repeat the teachings of the yery 
authority that is questioned and he is called 
upon to yindicate. His mind is distracted by 
an unpleasant dualism that bisects it, and he 
is unable to use* the same uniyersai principles: 
in defending supernatiu^al truth that he does 
in defending the truths of the natural or ra- 
tional order. He may haye been told, but he 
has neyer been made or enabled to see that the 
natural and the supernatural reciprocally de- 
mand each the other and are in reality but two 
parts of one dialectic whole. Christianity is 
teleological and does but complete, perfect, 
what is initial, inchoate, in nature. 

The religious education stops short with doc- 
trines and does not show the pupil by logical 
analysis that each doctrine of reyelation, each 
proposition of faith, if you will, rests on a uni- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 27 

Yereal principle, always and everywhere be- 
lieYed, and wliicli cannot be denied witbout de- 
nying the reason common to all men, nor 
doubted witbont denying tbat doubt is doubt. 
It is this fact that is either not brought out at 
ail or not brought out in sufficient prominence 
by our colleges and universities. In former 
times this was hardly necessary. Doubt and de- 
nial were not then carried so far, a less inade- 
quate philosophy was taught in the universities, 
and intellectual as well as moral and spiritual 
culture was far higher, not only in the educated 
classes, but in the community generally. To 
meet the new want, the professor may need to 
be trained in a department of thought which he 
has not hitherto been required to master, a new 
branch of science, which I may call the Philos- 
ophy of Keligion. 

For this purpose it becomes necessar}^ to re- 
vise the generally received philosophy, correct 
its method and principles, and supply its de- 
fects, so as to harmonize it with common sense 
and tradition, and establish the identity of the 
principles of science and the principles of 
things, or the identity of the knowable and the 
real; that is, to show that the order of science 
follows the order of being, and in their princi- 
ples they are identical, whether the science be 



28 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



of the natural or of the supernatural. 

There is, beyond a question, a necessity of 
more thorough instruction in logic and philos- 
ophy for non-professional students in our higher 
schools; but, unhappily, since Descartes, con- 
tinuing the work of Luther and Calvin, detached 
it from theology, brought it out of the schools 
and submitted it to the judgment of people of 
the world, as they had theology itself, philoso- 
phy except with the theologians has been unset- 
tled and well-nigh lost. As taught in connection 
with the revealed dogmas, it still subsists; but 
as a detached and separate science we can hard- 
ly say there is any philosophy worthy of the 
name now recognized. Out of a dozen or more 
text-books used in our colleges which I have 
examined, though they all have their special 
merits, there is not one that I can unreservedly 
recommend. Some of them adopt the ontologi- 
cal principle and method, and some of them the 
psychological principle and method, and others 
partly the one and partly the other, but without 
the scientific principle that unites them as in- 
dissoluble xDarts of one dialectic whole. 

In theology the dogma corrects and renders 
nugatory any errors there may happen to be 
in the professor's philosophy as a detached or 
separate science. But, as disconnected mth the- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 29 

ology and cultiyated as simply tlie science of 
reason separately from the Oliristian dogmas, 
I know no text-book that is not more or less ob- 
jectionable. Onr professors nearly all profess 
to follow St. Thomas, bnt the difficnlty is that 
they are nnable to agree among themselves as 
to what is the philosophy St. Thomas actnally 
taught. For myself, I think, from the little I 
know of the works of the Angel of the Schools, 
that there are problems in philosophy raised by 
modern scepticism which thej do not solve, nor 
even treat; bnt in all questions which they do 
treat I should seriously distrust m}^ own judg- 
ment if I found myself differing from their real 
sense; that is, as I understand them. Yet I find 
comparatively few who understand St. Thomas 
precisely as I do, and I have no right to set my 
tinderstanding up against that of others who 
probably have spent more years than I have 
days in the study of his works. 

One thing, however, I think, is certain, that 
St. Thomas was neither what in these days is 
called an ontologist nor a psychologist, and 
equally certain am I that neither exclusive on- 
tology nor exclusive psychology accords either 
with Catholic theology or the necessary and 
indestructible elements of thought. The ontol- 
ogist, properly so called, is not one who simply 



30 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

holds tliat being, or, in scholastic language, ens^ 
is the first immediate object of the mind, but 
that ens, or being, is the primnm philosophic 
cum, or sole princij)le, of philosophy, from which 
all in philosophy is logically dedncible; the psy- 
chologist — I should prefer to say psychologer or 
psychologtie — is, as I understand the term, not 
one who simply holds that the mind in philoso- 
phizing starts from a datum taken from our 
thought, but from theintuitionof the human soul 
itself or its consciousness of its own existence, 
and who professes from that to deduce logically 
the unirei^e, its principles and its creator, God: 
and his attributes, as was the pretension of 
Descartes. I leave out for the moment the T)seu- 
dontologists of Germany, for they are not on- 
tologists at all, btit mere psychologists. Their 
absolute is an abstraction, a logical or mental 
conception, not real being or ens necessarium 
et reale, as say the schoolmen, and take the 
real ontologists, like the Louyain professors, the 
Jestiits Fournier and Eothenflue, and others 
who hold that the ens inttiitirely presented as 
the first and immediate object of the intellect 
is real being, not a mental conception. These, 
by making ens their sole principle of jDhiloso- 
phy, from which all existences are to be logi- 
cally declucible, are not able logically to escape 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 31 

pantheism. NotMng can be deduced logically 
from ens that does not necessarily follow from 
it or that is not necessarily contained in it, for 
deduction is simply analysis, and the conclusion 
that does not follow necessarily is invalid. The 
creatiye act cannot be deduced from the intui- 
tion of ens unless necessarily contained in it,, 
and then the creation deduced would be a nec- 
essary creation and a necessary creation is no 
creation at all, for it gives nothing distinguish- 
able from ens itself. The universe deduced from 
ens will be only a universe contained in ens and 
identical with ens itself, which is pantheism 
pure and simple. 

But is exclusive psychology or psychologism 
any better? The psychologist holds from Des- 
cartes, who, in undertaking to reform philoso- 
phy, as Luther in undertaking to reform theol- 
ogy, has muddled it and virtually destroyed it. 
Their philosophical primum, or principle, is the 
"I am'^ in the famous "Cogito ergo sum; I think, 
therefore I am." I will not dwell here on the 
fact that this enthymem is a sheer paralogism,, 
but will take it as Descartes himself, when 
hard pressed by his Jesuit opponent, explains 
it in one of his Letters, not as an argument ad- 
duced to prove one's own existence, but as the= 
statement of the fact in which one finds or be- 



32 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

comes conscious of it. The Cartesian doctrine, 
or psjcliologism, is that the soul, I myself, being 
given, I can deduce from it, after the manner 
of the geometiicians, God, creation, the nni- 
Terse and its principles and laws. Bnt, I repeat, 
deduction is analysis, and I can logically deduce 
from my personal existence, or the soul, only 
what is in it; that is, myself and my subjective 
modes or affections. Consequently the God and 
the universe I deduce and construct with my 
conceptions of myself can be only myself and 
the modes and affections of my personal exist- 
ence, which is what is called in the history of 
philosophical systems egoism, or that I am God, 
and all that is or exists. 

Of course the text-books referred to, or any 
Catholic philosopher, draw, in fact, neither of 
these conclusions; they are saved from that by 
their theology. Practically no Catholic philos- 
opher is a pure ontologist or a pure psycholo- 
gist; my objection does not mean this, it only 
means that some adopt the ontological princi- 
ple and method, others the psychological princi- 
ple and method, which, if logically carried out, 
would lead to one or the other fatal extreme. 
Yet it is only among the heterodox, restrained 
by no creed and by no theological formula, that 
we can find the principle and method of either 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 3S 

freely developed and pushed to the last logical 
consequence. In the systems of the heterodox 
we may see whither lead unsound principles 
and methods which we ourselves may have 
adopted without suspecting their unsoundness 
or foreseeing their consequences. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman 
Clarke, and all the American transcendentalists 
adopt the ontological principle and method, 
recognize only two categories, being and phe- 
nomena, the one real^ the other in its distinc- 
tion unreal, and are pure ontologistis and excel- 
lent exponents of ontologism. All that is real 
they identify with being, and all that is not the 
one only bein^ they resolve into phenomena, 
which is mere appearance, illusory, unreal. Be- 
ing is one and universal ; is all the real, the only 
force, substance, or activity, and you may call 
it God or nature as best suits your taste. 

Take, for instance, the following noteworthy 
extract from a lecture on Religion by Mr. Em- 
erson, the Corypheus of the school, and you 
will see very clearly what ontologism is when 
and where it is logically carried out : 

"We can hardly,'' says Mr. Emerson, "take up 
a pamphlet or journal in these days which does 
not announce some new and important discov- 
ery in science or in practical art, in astronomy, 



34 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

in cliemistry, in nayigation, in meclianics; and 
these annonncements are no longer turned over 
to adepts, bnt are examined with ayiditv bv all 
readers, and sonieTrhat indirectly realized and 
made real to the commnnitT. Xot only so, bnr 
we hare long ago found that these facts of na- 
ture react directly on oi3inions of society and 
life. When Copernicus dismissed our little ball 
to its tiuT insio'uificance in the solar svstem, 
and then in the vast ether in which that system 
revolres, the mortified inhabitant was forced, to 
abate his claim to hold longer the central city 
of the God of Xature. The nebular theory 
spoiled our nursery clock. The new measures 
hj geologists of the antiquity of the planet in- 
terfere with our sacred chronology. The new 
docrine of he correlation of force showed that 
all force was one, whether in the form of grav- 
ity, of polarity, of heat, of light, of electricity, 
or of muscular force, suggesting also Lliat will 
was not far off. Each is convertible into the 
other. That doctrine showed unity, dissolving 
all in itself. Then chemistry lately came to the 
aid of astronomy, and showed the substance of 
the atoms of the sun and stars to be identical 
with our own, the same chemical elements. 
Then the doctrine of compensations — the very 
word analogy — the doctrine of corresponden- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 35 

cies, showed a unity still more stupendous. Still 
tlie animals disclosed the same intellect as in 
mauj though initial, only working to humble 
ends — but, so far as it went, identical in nim 
with his, baffling him sometimes by showing 
more fertile good sense in the animal than in 
the hunter, but everywhere intelligible to us 
because like ours. Science corrects theology, 
line after line, until few of the lines are left. 
Its irresistible generalizations destroy the im- 
portance of persons and anecdotes, just as as- 
tronomy dealt with the old legends 31 Orion, 
and the Milky Way, and Hercules, and Cassi- 
opea^s Chair, or with the gypsy's and the astrol- 
oger's heaven to tell fortunes at a shilling a 
day. As the old astrologer did, so does this {. s- 
tronomy make mean, or national, or personal, 
interpretation of the universe impossible. It 
requires a history up to the style of the works, 
makes miracles, which were the material of the 
religious history of all barbarous nations, im- 
possible, by supplying a truth which defies all 
prodigy to render. Though we see these grand 
laws only in glimpses, the glimpse is final, and 
the smallest inch of the ecliptic being once pos- 
itively ascertained, determines the entire and 
enormous round for me as surely as if I saw it 
with the eves. 



36 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

^^Science lias made it impossible to introduce- 
persons, or places, or the schemes of theolo- 
gians, into the mind. The vast generalizations^ 
of science destroy such tor heavens. In this uine- 
teenth century everything told us of a Creator 
must be on a scale in which he is known to us- 
in his works, and not an the fond legends of an 
ignorant tribe. Astronomy, chemistry, botany^ 
zoology, have made the old Calvinism and other 
once possible creeds impossible to be the foods 
of a new age. The truths of the ransom, of atone- 
ment, the song of the angels and the like, jusii 
fication by faith, the vicarious sacrifice, are only 
a i)etrifaction of momentary tropes, by too. fre- 
quent use, into articles of a creed. The unspar- 
ing, impassable solutions of science have dis- 
posed once for all of the dusty corners and cob- 
webs, and the middle-age Christianity is as dead 
as paganism.''^ 

There is no mistaking the thought that un- 
derlies these finely chiselled sentences, any more 
than there is their oracular tone. It is pure on- 
tologism, and teaches that all reality, all sub- 
stance, all force, is one and identical. A more 
perfect reductio ad absurdum it is impossible 
to conceive; yet grave men hold it to be wise 
and i3rofound, almost divinely inspired. If all 
reality is resolvable into unity, who' or what is 



SYNTHETIC PHILCSOPHY. 37 

this Mr. Emerson liimself, wlio gives forth his 
oracles? Is he the one iiniyersal being, force, 
or substance, or is he a mere illusion, an un- 
reality, a nothing — as Carlisle would say — an 
unveracity? Whom is he speaking to and try- 
ing to convince of the truth of his doctrine, if 
all personal and other distinctions are unreal? 
The very attemjot to state the doctrine refutes 
it; for it cannot be expressed in language with- 
out self-contradiction, or without asserting the 
falsity of the language that expresses it. Yet 
thousands who shrink from the absurd conse- 
quence hold and cherish the principle. 

The appeal to science which Mr. Emerson 
makes in proof of his doctrine, or of the false- 
ness of theology, is wholly inconclusive. It is 
idle, if all is one and identical, to talk to us of 
the discoveries of astronomy, to speak of the 
vastness of the celestial worlds, and the "tiny 
insignificance of our earth in the solar system," 
or to dilate on the absurdity of regarding our 
earth as central. To unity there is no great, no 
small, no big, no little; its centre is everywhere, 
and its circumference nowhere. There is no 
comparison with only one term. All coanpari- 
sons imply distinctions, and if all is resolved 
into unity, all distinctions are obliterated. The 
discovery of the correlation of forces proves, 



B8 FAITH AND SCIEXCE. 

Mr. Emerson tliinks, that all forces are one and 
identical. But if all forces are one and identical, 
liow can tliere be any correlation of forces? 
Ohemistrj has not proved, nor do its discoveries 
tend to prove, tliat all substances are one and 
identical; for it neither does nor can tell ns 
what substance is. It does and can tell us only 
its phenomena, and if Mr. Emerson's doctrine 
be true, phenomena are unreal, and therefore 
nothing. Chemistry is as far from telling us 
the essence of substance as is mechanics. It can 
at best only give us sensible properties or ef- 
fects, and these certainly are not one and identi- 
cal. 

I do not question the scientific facts alleged, 
l>ut the generalizations from them are not in- 
controvertible. Scientists have a habit, not in 
all respects commendable, of stating as a fact 
what is really only their induction from what 
they take to be facts. In truth, no one who has 
-not in his mind the real principles of the uni- 
verse, and by which all facts are explained, is 
capable of observing and stating truly and ad- 
equately what are or are not facts. Facts are 
really cognizable only in the light of their prin- 
ciple. The scientific generalizations, which ^JDr. 
Emerson alleges, attain at best only to the type 
or law according to which all created forces, or 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 39 

second causes, exist and operate, or produce 
their effects, and the most that they prove is 
the unity of this type or law, not by any means 
the unity and identity of all substances or 
forces. They prove, perhaps, the unity and 
identity of the cause producing and sustaining 
them; but even if so, science corrects not a sin- 
gle line of theology, for theology teaches, and 
always has taught, that the type, idea, or para- 
digm, after which all things are created, exist, 
and act, is the divine idea, one and eternal in 
the divine mind, and identical with the di^dne 
essence; for, as St. Thomas says, idea in mente 
divina nihil est aliud quam essentia Dei. Ac- 
cording to theology, then, all existences must 
be created after one and the same type, and 
follow in their activity and development one 
and the same law, and therefore St. Thomas 
says again, Deus est similitudo rerum omnium. 
Science, then, as far as it goes, confirms theol- 
ogy, instead of correcting or upsetting it. It 
would not be amiss if those who try to show an 
antagonism between science and theology were 
to make themselves moderately familiar with 
what theologians of the first order actually 
teach. But this is aside from our present pur- 
pose, and I will only add Mr. Emerson betrays 
his lack rather than his mastery of science when 



40 FAITH AXD SCIENCE. 

lie makes will and -grayitatiou identical. Will 
names a vis, or a force, grayitation names sim- 
ply a fact, or a cla«s of facts, and there is an ob- 
yioiis difference betyreen the fact and the yis 
or force that produces it. So much for ontolo- 
gism among the heterodox, when it is logically 
carried out, and proyed to what contradictions 
and absurdities it leads. 

Psychologism among the heterodox has free 
course, and is pushed, like ontologism, to it& 
last consequence. Descartes, its founder, re- 
quires us to eliminate, at least pro^isorily^ 
from our minds eyerything, or to doubt eyery- 
thing, except the s-imple consciousness of our 
personal existence, which, he maintains, it ia 
imposfiible to doubt; and then from our per- 
sonal existence to deduce God and the uniyerse*. 
or else not admit them. But he himself did 
neither. He inyoked the A^eracity of God to 
proye the objectiye yerity of his subjective ideas, 
or innate ideas, as he said, and then adduced 
the objectiye yerity of his ideas to proye the 
being of God and the existence of the created 
uniyerse, grayely asserting, '^I think God, there-, 
fore God is." Kant adopted the Cartesian 
method and principle, and was faithful to both. 
From the psychological data, tlie soul and its 
modes or affections, he reduced all science ta 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 41 

the science of the subject, and denied the ability 
of the subject to cognize the objective. Aristo- 
tle had made the categories neither subjectiA^e 
nor objective, but forms of the ideal or logical 
world, a sort of tertium quid between the phys- 
ical world and the mind, but nevertheless the 
medium of objective cognition. Kane makes 
them forms of the subject and of no validity 
out of the sphere of the subject, and consequent- 
ly denied to the soul all means of knowing any- 
thing but its own modes and sentiments, 

Fichte, a disciple of Kant, but a bolder spirit, 
adopts the Cartesian j)rinciple and method, but 
instead of saying, cogito ergo sum, he said, 
volo ergo sum, I will, therefore I am. If I am, I 
am being; if I am being, I am God, and then all 
that is, and there is nothing besides but my own 
productions. I am twofold, absolute and rela- 
tive. In my projections I am relative, phenom- 
enal; in myself, in my realit}^, I am (Absolute, 
universal, eternal, infinite. Hegel, a disciple of 
the same school starts not with the soul itself, 
but with an act of the soul, a mental conception, 
which, as all conceptions, is subjective, and 
takes as his principle the abstract being of con- 
ception, equivalent, he himself says, to not-be- 
ing, and proceeds to construct God and the uni- 
verse according to the logical process of thought. 



42 



FAITH AND SCIEXCE. 



As lie starts from an abstraction, which is noth- 
ing, he has no difficnlty in arriving, through ab- 
stractions joined to abstractions, at — nothing.. 

Descaiiies took for his primnm the sonl and 
its ideas. Berkeley starts from the ideas, which 
are only modes or affections of the sonl, and yery 
logically concludes that nothing exists bnt 
ideas, and resolves the external world into, 
ideas, which subsist only in my mind, and, of 
course, have no existence when I am fast asleep 
and do not dream, or when I am dead. Thus 
subjective idealism lost the material world, and 
really all objective existence. 

Condillac starts with the Berkeleian ideas bor- 
rowed from Descartes, resones them and all 
being and existences into sensations, loses the 
soul as a substantive existence, and turns it into 
a sensation transformed, in which he only fol- 
lows Descartes, who always speaks of the soul 
as la pensee, as the act, not as the actor. Yet 
there have been gra^'e men who regarded Des- 
cartes as a philosopher. 

These instances, which might be indefinitely 
multiplied, show that among the heterodox, for 
Descartes, whatever he professed, was no Cath- 
olic, men have actually drawn the absurd com 
elusions which I have said follow necessarily 
from adopting either the ontological or the psy- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 43 

chological principle and method alone. BotLi 
subject and object are lost or by turns denied 
by philosophers, and nothing remains. Hence 
a wide-spread distrust of reason or of the hu- 
man mind itself marks our age. The heterodox 
world turn with a sort of disgust from the study 
of philosophy and take to the study of the phys- 
ical sciences, perfectly unaware that without 
philosophy theology, the queen of the sciences^ 
is impossible, and that without theology the 
physical sciences cannot be successfully culti- 
vated, as is proved by the respect obtained for 
such monstrosities, labelled science, as the pos- 
itivism of Auguste Comte, the physical basis of 
life by Professor Huxley, the production of life 
by the chemical, electrical, and mechanical ar- 
rangement of matter by Herbert Spencer, the 
origin of species by natural selection and the de- 
velopment of man from the monkey or tadpole 
by Charles Darwin. Having lost the science 
both of reason and revelation, the heterodox 
mind of the day seems to have lost common 
sense, and seeks to get effects without causes, 
to explain the origin of the vforld without a 
creator, and its government without moral law, 
and to conduct society without conscience, while 
all the time it boasts of its intelligence and the 
marvellous progress it has made and is making. 



■44 FAITH AND SCIENCE.- 

Ontologism and psycliologism end alike in nes- 
cience and nihilism, the one losing the subject, 
and the other the object, and the physical sci- 
ences, cultivated without the light of theology, 
lose God, lose moral life, lose mental vigor, en- 
feeble and lower character, materialize ii telli- 
gence, class man with the brutes, and resolve 
the universe into a gas, or develop it witliout a 
creator from nothing. 

Our Catholic philosoi)hers are, as I have ^iid. 
restrained by their theology from rinining to 
these fearful extremes, which we meet among 
the heterodox, and in which they glory; j nd 
none of our text-books are either i3urely onto- 
logical or purely psychological, that is, none of 
them that I have seen and examined follow 
throughout, and strictly, either the on.ologi^'il 
principle and method or the psychological pri i- 
ciple and method. They all, as a matter of fact, 
make philosophy consist of logic, ontoL)gy, i.id 
psychology, and in the constrution of their on- 
tology they use psychological data, as (hey do 
ontological data in the construction of their psy- 
chology; but their authors seem to me, if they 
will permit me to say so, to hold, and by their 
avowed principle and method are required to 
hold, if inclining to the ontological principle 
and method, that they derive their psychological 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 45 

'data by deduction from the intuition of being, 
or, if inclining to the psychological principle 
and method, that they derive their ontologicaJ 
data inductively from the intuition of the soul, 
or the contingent. Yet I think, with all defer- 
ence, that this is the effect of incomplete or in- 
exact analysis of thought, rather than any de- 
fect of logical vigor or acumen. A few words of 
explanation, it seems to me, would remove all 
objections, and place the doctrine of these text- 
books in complete harmony with Catholic the- 
ology and effect a perfect agreement between 
the two schools, without any sacrifice of princi- 
ple on the part of either. 

Cousin contended that he attained legiti- 
mately to ontology by the psychological method, 
or by induction from the facts of consciousness; 
Sir William Hamilton denies it, asserts that the 
ontological cannot be obtained from the i)sy- 
chological, and maintains that philosophy is re- 
stricted to logic and psychology. Sir Willians 
Hamilton, though well versed in the literature 
of philosoph}^, was no philosopher, not any more 
than was Herbert Spencer or J. Stuart Mill, men 
wholly destitute of philosophical genius, though 
not of philosophical talent. Yet the Scotsman 
and the Englishmen are right in denying that 
the ontological can be logically concluded from 



46 FAITH AND SCIEXCE. 

psjcliological data; and the Frenchman, too, 
is right in maintaining that it can be obtained 
from a careful analysis of the facts of conscious- 
ness, for the facts of consciousness are not pure- 
ly psychological. Cousin found in analyzing 
consciousness, or, more properly, thought, what 
he calls necessary or absolute ideas, which, in 
fact, are not psychological. They are insepara- 
ble from our intelligence, and without them no 
mind, no reason, no knowledge of any kind or 
degree, no act of intelligence is possible. So far 
he is right. All philosophers of any nerve rec- 
ognize these necessary or absolute ideas. But 
Cousin attempts to obtain the ontological by 
induction from them, and fails, because he fails 
to perceiye that they are themselyes the onto- 
logical, or identically being itself. He took 
them to be abstract ideas, and did not under- 
stand that abstractions are nullities. What we 
call necessary and absolute ideas, as the one, 
the universal, the eternal, the immutable, and 
the perfect, which certainly enter into every 
thought, and mthout which no thought is pos- 
sible, are not abstractions, or abstract ideas, as 
psychologists call them, but necessary, univer- 
sal, eternal, immutable, and perfect being in- 
tuitively presented or apprehended. Hence St. 
Augustine says, as say Malebranche and Gerdil 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 47' 

after him, that in the intuition of the perfect^ 
or in the idea of the perfect, we have intuition 
of God, or of perfect being, though we do^ not 
usually advert to the fact, or take note of it. 
But as ideas are so called in relation to the hu- 
man mind, as they are detected in the mind, and' 
as the mind does not and cannot apprehend 
them without apprehending its own existence 
and intellectual activity, it follows that the psy- 
chological principle is given along with them,, 
and not derived by a logical process from them. 

The two points on which philosophers, espe- 
cially since Descartes, appear to me to be at 
fault are first, in not clearly apprehending that 
the necessary or absolute, the ideal, is ontologi- 
cal, or that these ideas, which they all recognize 
and assert as an indispensable element of 
thought, are identified in real and necessary 
being; and, secondly, in not distinctly recogniz- 
ing the fact that the ontological principle, ens,, 
and the psychological principle, contingens,, 
are given the mind simultaneously in one and 
the same intuition, and that neither is obtained 
or obtainable by a discursive or logical process; 
from the other. 

The first grows out of not perceiving that ab- 
stractions are in themselves nothing, and that 
nothing is unintelligible, and can be no object: 



48 FAITH AXD SCIEXCE. 

of intuition. Abstractions are mental concep- 
tions, formed bv the mind operating on their 
concretes intuitivelT presented. Tliere is and 
can be no intuition of tlie abstract, for as ab- 
stract it exists only in the mind, though, as St. 
Thomas says, it exists in mente cum fundament o 
in re. There is no whiteness without the white, 
and no roundness without the round, either in 
re or in mente. As an abstraction, either is a 
mere conception, not an idea, and is apprehensi- 
ble only in the intuition of the concrete from 
which it is abstracted. Xecessary and absolute 
ideas cannot be abstractions formed by the 
mind, because they are intuitirely held, and 
therefore must be objectively real, because the 
mind has intuition of no concretes from which 
it can abstract them, as roundness from the 
round, and because the mind does not and can- 
not exist and operate without them. They 
must then be real and necessary being, consid- 
ered as facing, or as intelligible to the human 
intellect. They are then not data from which 
the ontological is obtained by a logical process, 
but are themselves the ontological intuitively 
affirmed. 

The second failure grows out of the first. The 
mind never acts or operates withotit a con- 
sciotisness or recognition of its own existence. 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 49 

In thm sense Descartes says truly, Oogito ergo 
sum, I think, therefore I exist. In every thought 
I have a direct or reflex consciousness of my- 
self. But I do not think, or perform any mental 
operation, in which I think myself only, or with- 
out the aid or concurrence of the ontological,, 
or the ideal. If I think such or such a thing is, 
or is not, is this, or is that, I think, besides the 
particular object of my thought, being, express- 
ed by the substantive verb is. If I think such 
or such a thing is necessary, or that such or 
such a consequence follows necessarily from 
such or such premises, I think, I afiflrm, or have 
intuition of real and necessary being. I cannot 
think the contingent without thinking the nec- 
essary, the finite without thinking the infinite, 
the particular without thinking the universal,, 
the imperfect without thinking the perfect, the 
temporary without thinking the eternal. These 
are all presented in thought as correlatives, and 
correlatives connote (connotant) each other^ 
though we may be so intent on the one as not 
to advert to its correlative, and so take no note 
of it, or of the fact that it is actually included 
in the same thought. Kant has proved all this 
in explaining how what he calls synthetic judg- 
ments a priori are formed, but he spoils all he 
does by making the ontological or necessary el- 



50 FAITH AND SCIEXCE. 

ements of the judgment necessary forms of the 
subject, instead of intuitions of real and neces- 
sary being under the only forms in which it is 
intelligible to the human intellect and enters 
into every human thought. How can the neces- 
sary, the universal, the eternal, the perfect, be 
forms of a contingent, limited, imperfect sub- 
ject? Every difficulty is avoided by understand- 
ing that correlatives do not imply, but connote, 
each other, and in the intuition of the one there 
is really intuition of both; therefore the psy- 
chological and the ontological are not inferred 
either from the other, but both are given to- 
gether simultaneously in one and the same in- 
tuition. 

But a careful analysis of thought goes per- 
haps further, and discloses the fact that not 
only are the ontological and the psychological 
given simultaneously in one and the same in- 
tuition, but that they are given in their real re- 
lation, or real synthesis. Ens, or being, is in- 
telligible per se, and can be thought or intui- 
tively presented by itself, without relation to 
any thing distinguishable from itself; but con- 
tingentia, or contingent existences, are not in- 
telligible per se, because they exist only in re- 
lation to being and not per se any more than 
they do in se or a se. They are given us in intu- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 51 

ition not as necessary being, but as contingent, 
dependent, insufficient for tttemselyes, and hav- 
ing their being not in themselves, but in an- 
other. Hence the question, when we contem- 
plate them, rises spontaneously. Whence come 
they? What is their cause? or what causes 
them? It is from this conception of the contin- 
gencj of the world, the insufficiency of contin- 
gent things for themselves, their dependence on 
something which they are not, their relativity, 
that the inductive theologians, including, per- 
haps, St. Thomas himself, conclude the exist- 
ence of God. But this conclusion would be with- 
out scientific validity, and even absurd, if in our 
intuition of contingent existences we had not 
intuition of them as contingent, or of their re- 
lation to being, on which they depend, and from 
which they are distinguished. There is no logi- 
cal process by which contingency, or depend- 
ence, can be concluded from the intuition of our- 
selves, or of things around us, if they are given 
in our intuition of them as simply indetermi- 
nate ens, being, or substance, as the pantheists 
on the one hand, and the atheists on the other, 
have unanswerably proved. Besides, the inde- 
terminate has no objective existence, and can- 
not be intuitively presented. 
• But why is it that the mind, that reason, re- 



52 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

Yolts at both atheism and pantheism, and inva- 
riably, when contemplating particular exist- 
ences, feels that thej are insufficient for them- 
selves, and asks and seeks their cause? Why 
but because it intuitively perceives that they 
are not necessary, independent, self-existent be- 
ing, but are contingent, dependent existences, 
that have not their being or their cause in them- 
selves? If the mind had not intuition of them 
as causatae, it would not and could not seek 
their cause or conceive of them as caused; for 
conceptions, St. Thomas tells us, have their 
foundation in reality and can be formed only 
from intuitions, or objects really presented in 
intuition. The category of cause is necessary 
and indestructible, and, as it is not a necessary 
form either of the object or of the subject, it 
must be intuitive W given in the intuition as the 
act of ens, producing, or creating and sustain- 
ing contingentia, or dependent existences. 
Hence the ontological and the psychological in 
their synthesis, or real relation, according to 
which the ontological causes, or creates, exist- 
ences, are given in one and the same intuition. 

That ideal intuition, or, rather, the intuition 
of the ideal, embraces both in their real synthe- 
sis, or being and existences connected by the 
creative act of being, I am well aware, w^ill not 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 5^ 

be universally accepted; perhaps cliiefly from 
my inability to make my meaning intelligible. 
Gentile philosophers had no conception of cre- 
ation, and hence they regarded the universe as 
an emanation of being, as generated by being, 
or as formed by intelligent force operating on 
a passive and eternal matter as its stuff or ma- 
terial. Most modern philosophers fail to recog- 
nize that the fact of creation is given in intuition, 
and hence either remit it to theology as a fact 
of revelation, not of philosophy, or attempt to 
obtain it by first establishing the contingent 
character of particular existences. But this is 
because philosophers have usually been more 
intent on analyzing conception than intuition. 
Conceptions, in the language of moderns ideas, 
may be confused, inadequate, erroneous even, 
but they always presuppose intuition, which 
alone presents, or places in the mind, the object 
or concrete reality from which the mind forms 
its conceptions. A failure to effect a perfect an- 
alysis of the contents of the intuition, of course, 
will render inadequate or erroneous the con- 
ception. It is precisely in the analysis of intui- 
tion, or thought, that philosophers, in my judg- 
ment, have the most signally failed, and it is 
precisely their defective analysis that I have 
been endeavoring to indicate and rectify. 



54 FAITH AXD SCIEXCE, 

All the principlets of tlioiiglit must be given 
intuitivelT, and principles of thought must in- 
clude the real, be identically the principles of 
the real order, or the thought will be inade- 
quate, unreal, and science a failure; for all sci- 
ence is hj thought, and can contain no principle 
not presented in thotight or intuition. If. then, 
the creative act is not presented in the intuition 
it cannot be included in j)hilosoi)hy. We may 
have, as Cousin has well sai.d, less in oiu- phi- 
losox)y than is given in intuition, btit we can- 
not have more: and I may remark by the way, 
that it is becatise it has less that i^hilosophy is 
so often found at logger-heads with common 
sense. Yet St. Thomas and all our philosophers 
attemi:)t to i^rove the fact of creation by otir nat- 
ural reason, or that contingent existences, all 
things distinguishable from being, are produced 
and stistained by the creative act of being from 
nothing, evincing thereby that they have the 
conception of creation; btit how can they have 
the conception if the fact is not presented in 
intuition ? 

The general impression that creatures are 
apprehensible without inttiition of their rela- 
tion to being, is due in part to mistaking con- 
ception for inttiition. We certainly can con- 
ceive of them as abstracted from that relation. 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 55 

as we can roundness abstracted from the round ; 
but this conception is not intuition, it is formed 
by the mind from the intuition. The impres- 
sion is also partly due to a faulty definition of 
substance as that which exists in se non in alio, 
in itself, not in another as mode or attribute. 
Existences do certainly not exist in another as 
modes or attributes, neither do they exist in se. 
It is only being" that exists in se, and hence 
Spinoza and Cousin, who adopt tliis definition, 
maintain that being, that is, God, is the only 
substance, and that all else is attribute, mode, 
or phenomenon. Taking substance in the sense 
of the positive part of this definition, there is 
no reason why all substances, all contingent 
existences, should not be presented in intuition 
by themselves, for what exists by itself may un- 
doubtedly be intuitively presented by itself. But 
this would suppose that existences, which have 
not their being in themselves, and are nothing 
out of their relation to being, are presented in 
intuition as absolute, necessary, independent, 
and self-existent beings. Intuition presents 
things as they are, not as they are not. When 
intuitively presented we may by abstraction 
conceive of them without taking note of their 
relation to being, but they can be presented 
by intuition only in the relation in which they 



56 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

actually exist, and therefore not as independ- 
ent or indeterminate substances. 

The impression is furthermore caused by the 
failure of philosophers to distinguish between 
substans and substantia. Substans, as the word 
implies, is that which stands under, upholds^, 
or supports. Substances stand under, uphold, or 
support their accidents, and so far substans 
and substantia are identical. But contingent 
substances must themselves be stood under, up- 
held, or supported, and that which stands un- 
der, upholds, or supports them is again sub° 
stans and distinct from substances. Pantheists 
identify substans with ens, or being, and thus 
make existences attributes, modes, or phenom- 
ena of being, as do Mr. Emerson and his fol- 
lowers. Deists and scientists identify substans 
and substantia, and assume that existences have 
their own support in themselves, and that when 
once created and set agoing the universe goe& 
of itself by virtue of its own inherent laws and 
forces. Hence they very logically conclude that 
existences are apprehensible by themselves 
without intuition of their relation to being, and 
also that any miraculous or supernatural inter- 
vention on the part of the Creator in mundane 
affairs w^ould show great want of skill or power 
in the Creator himself, or else would be a gross 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 57 

piece of impertinence. Hence their sturdy op- 
position to all miracles and to the supernatural 
order which Christians assert. Others, includ- 
ing Dr. Brownson, distinguish the substans 
from ens as the act from the actor, and from 
substantia, substance or existences, as the act 
from its effect, thus identifying it with the cre- 
ative act of being producing and supporting ex- 
istences from nothing. As it produces and sus- 
tains contingent existences, and they are noth- 
ing without it, it must be conceded, either that 
we have no intuition of contingent existences, 
or that intuition of them necessarily includes 
intuition of the creative act of being which pro- 
duces them from nothing, and as a continuous 
act sustains them, for it is precisely in the cre- 
ative act that their contingency consists, and 
therefore the contingent is unthinkable without 
it. 

No doubt the view here presented with re- 
gard to abstractions differs somewhat from that 
generally taken by philosophers, but because I 
distinguish sharply intuition and conception, 
and because I am less concerned with the ques- 
tion. How or by what means we know, than 
with the question, What we know. I hold that 
to know is to know, and that when one knows 
he knows that he knows. I hold, too, that the 



58 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

principles and the matter of all science are in- 
tnitiyely presented, and that all reflection, dis- 
cnrsion, abstraction, comparing, analyzing, syn- 
thetizing, or other operations of the mind, if 
other operations there are, have for their sole 
object to draw out and put the mind in posses- 
sion of what is given or presented in intuition. 
Descartes either fails to' recognize intuition, or 
confounds it with conception. Conception is an 
act of the mind, and hence the great question 
with Descartes, and with philosophers since his 
time, is the question of the truth, or objective 
validity of our conceptions, ideas, in modern 
language, that is, as Balmes says, of certitude,, 
which is hardly a question at all with the scho- 
lastics, and just as little with me. The question 
of certitude mth me touches not the intuition, 
but the conceptions; and, as to these, is settled 
by reference to what is intuitively given or pre- 
sented in thought, which, as Cousin has said 
truly, embraces simultaneously the subject and 
object and their relation, just what I have been 
laboring all along to prove. I know and ask no 
higher certitude than intuition. Descartes lost: 
all certitude when he placed it in conception 
and held that it consisted in the clearness of 
the mental conception, or as he said, idea. 

Aristotle would seem to teach that abstrac- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 59 

tions are apprehensible by the mind without 
their concretes, but not that they can be intui- 
tively presented. According to him the catego- 
ries are formal, forms of the logical world, not, 
as I have said, of the mnndus physicus, and all 
knowledge of the intelligible is per speciem, by 
the intelligible species or ideas; but the intelli- 
gible species or ideas, though not ideas in our 
sense, nor in the Platonic sense, are not mental 
conceptions, or ideas in the Cartesian sense. 
The}^ were, as St. Thomas explains, presented 
to the mind in the phantasmata, and abstracted 
from them by the intellectus agens, or active in- 
tellect, and became the medium by which the 
intelligible is apprehended. What the peripa- 
tetics meant by them, or what led them to as- 
sert them, I know not; but this much St. Thomas 
does not allow, that the intellect terminates in 
them, and that it obtains the intelligible only 
by a logical inference from them. He maintains 
expressly (Sum. Tlieol. P. 1. Q. LXXXV. A. 2.) 
that they are that by which the mind attains to 
the intelligible, not that in which it terminates ; 
for it attains to the intelligible itself, and he 
gives in the article referred to most excellent 
reasons for the doctrine he teaches. 

Yet I have no doubt that the peripatetic doc- 
trine with regard to ideas or species, as the 



60 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

means of knomng, has intoenced modern pM- 
losophers and led them to suppose that abstrac- 
tions, if nothing in re, are yet the condition and 
baisis of the science of reason. All science is 
constructed, they tell us, with ideas, and all 
ideas are abstractions. Locke defines idea to be 
that with which the understanding is immedi- 
ately conversant; Balmes and most of our phi- 
losophers who profess to follow St. Thomas make 
ideas representatiye, and therefore abstractions, 
in which we may detect a trace of the phan- 
tasms and intelligible species of the peripatet- 
ics, so fiercely and, in my judgment, so success- 
fully assailed by Dr. Thomas Keid, the founder 
of the Scottish school, the most respectable 
school ever founded among the heterodox. Dr. 
Reid erred in making the principles of science 
primitive or necessary beliefs, as Kant did in 
making them forms of the subject, instead of 
regarding them, as they are, as intuitions pre- 
senting to the mind the principles of all the 
knowable and all the real; but he did good 
service to philosophy in maintaining most vig- 
orously in his "Inquiry Into the Human Mind on 
the Principles of Common Sense," that it is 
things themselves we apprehend in intuition, 
not their images or representations, the doc- 
trine I also maintain. 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 61 

In point of fact, the doctrine I maintain has 
Yery little to do with the abstractions or ab- 
stract ideas of the peripatetics, for I do not mean 
the same thing by them that they do. I distin- 
guish between conceptions and ideas. The 
conceptions are formed hj the mind operating 
on the concrete object presented by intuition, 
and abstraction is formed by the mind conceiv- 
ing that object under a particular aspect, or ab- 
stracting and generalizing some special quality 
detected in it and common to all objects of its 
class, as roundness, whiteness, roughness, sweet- 
ness, gentleness, which have indeed a founda- 
tion in realit}'', but as abstractions exist only 
in mente. I do not class genera and species, the 
real universals of the schoolmen, with abstrac- 
tions, for I hold that they really exist a parte 
rei, though never separate from their individu- 
als. The species is as real as the individual, 
and the individual is nothing without it. Though 
distinguishable, neither does or can exist with- 
out the other ; were it not so, it would be impos- 
sible to explain the fact of generation, or to 
make philosophy and theology accord. If the 
generic or specific were, as the old nominalists 
maintained, simply a quality of the individual, 
we should find it difficult, if not impossible, to 



62 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

explain the incarnation and the redemption of 
the race by our Lord. 

I do not, again, admit that the necessary and 
immutable ideas, which I call the ideal or ne- 
cessary element of eTery thought, are abstrac- 
tions; for there are no concretes, as I haye al- 
ready said, presented in intuition from which 
the mind can abstract them, and because, being 
necessary to thought, the mind could not oper- 
ate without them. They must therefore be, not 
mental conceptions, nor abstractions, but onto- 
logical, or real and necessary being itself, not 
its species, its image, or rej)resentation. Des- 
cartes called them innate, but, as that supposed 
them to be merely necessary forms of the sub- 
ject, he explained his meaning to be, not that 
the idea of God, for instance, is innate, but the 
faculty of thinking or conceiving of God is, 
which is liable to the rather grave objection 
that the God I think is simply my conception, 
an abstract and no real God at all, as is the God 
of all the psychologists. St. Augustine, as we 
have seen, holds the necessary ideal to be real, 
and St. Thomas maintains as much, and I think 
I have proved that it is identical with real and 
necessar}^ ens, or being, as the intelligible. 

Assuming now as established that the neces- 
sary or absolute ideas are ontological, identified 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 6E 

in real being intuitively presented, and that it 
is never presented in thougM without intnition 
of the psychological in its real relation to be- 
ing, the principle of all philosophy, of all sci- 
ence, or the intuitive element of thought, is not 
ens alone, nor contingens alone, but the two in 
their synthesis, or real and necessary being and 
contingent existences, the latter proceeding 
from the former, and united to it by the creative 
act of being producing and sustaining them 
from nothing. This asserts alike the principle 
of the ontologists and the principle of the psy- 
chologists, and connects them by the creative 
act of being, and lays the basis of a real and sci- 
entific, not a violent or empirical reconciliation 
of the two schools. It sacrifices neither to the 
other, leaves each in full possession of its prin- 
ciple, and makes philosophy a real science, 
founded on principles really given in intuition 
as the necessary and indestructible element of 
thought, and relieves it of the reproach of being 
either an abstract science or a science of ab- 
stractions, as is either ontologism or psychol- 
ogism. Philosophy is no more an abstract sci- 
ence than is mathematics or physics. With us 
philosophy is real, and more easily understood 
than any of the so-called "exact sciences." It 
comprehends the distinctive principle of every 



64 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

scliool, but is not eclectic or syncretic, but really 
and scientifically synthetic, as is all thought, 
and is free alike from all i)antheistic and all 
egoistic tendencies, both which end alike in nes- 
cience and nihilism. 

We take our principles, not from conceptions 
which are formed by the mind operating on con- 
cretes intuitively presented, but from intuition 
itself, which presents always the real, and there- 
fore our principles are given to, and, indeed, 
constitutive of, the mind, not formed by it or 
obtained as elements of thought by its own ac- 
tivity. Yet are they presented in thought, and 
it is by the analysis of thought the mind finds 
or ascertains them or becomes aware that it 
has them. Being logically and really precedes 
and creates existences, but in constructing phi- 
losophy or science we cannot begin with being, 
as the ontolo gists require, for that would compel 
us to construct our ontology with abstract con- 
ceptions. We must, as to our method, begin with 
the analysis of thought, for it is in thought only 
that the principles intuitively presented are 
found, and though the principles are all pre- 
sented in their synthesis, it strikes me, as we 
must begin by analyzing thought, — what Cousin 
calls the fact of consciousness, though improp- 
erly, because consciousness is simply the recog- 



SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 65 

nition of myself, in tlie act of thinking, as the 
subject, — tlie most simple metliod is to treat tlie 
psychological part of philosophy before proceed- 
ing to the ontological part. 

Then it is necessary to remark that intuition 
presents ens, or being, as the necessary ideal or 
intelligible, and it is not by intuition, but by 
reflection, invoMng more or less of a logical 
process, that we ascertain that the ideal or the 
intelligible, as intuitively presented, is real and 
necessary being, or that real and necessary be- 
ing is God. The reader will have observed that 
I have studiously avoided saying that we have 
intuition of God, or that we know by intuition 
either that God is or what he is. The intuition 
presents us the ideal, the intelligible, necessary^ 
universal, and immutable ideas, but it does not 
identify them with real and necessary beings 
nor does it identify real and necessary being 
with God. It is not true, then, if I am right, that 
we have intuition of God. Intuition presents 
us that which is being, which is God, but only 
under the form of the ideal or necessary ideas. 
This harmonizes vdth St. Augustine, who says 
we have intuition of God in the intuition of the 
perfect, only we do not advert to it or take note 
of it, and with St. Thomas, who says God is not 
known per se, or is not self-evident to us, but 



66 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

who, in the same article, admits that first prin- 
ciples, or necessary truths, what he calls neces- 
sary ideas, are self-evident, that is to say, intui- 
tive. But in point of fact, the queistion with St. 
Thomas is not An sit Deus, but Quid est Deus, 
for he says we cannot know formally that God 
is without knowing what he is, and this is not 
presented in intuition. Yet what God is is 
known, for, as St. Paul says, the invisible things 
of God, even his eternal power and divinity, are 
clearly seen from the creation of the world, be- 
ing understood (known, intellecta) by the things 
that are made. (Sum. TheoL, P. 1, Q. 1, A. 2). 

The philosophical reader cannot fail to per- 
ceive from what I here say, that no new philos- 
ophy is here proposed, nor any breaking with 
the philosophical tradition of the Catholic 
schools. In philosophy and theology I follow St. 
Augustine and St. Thomas, as in morals St. 
Gregory the Great, whom, after St. Paul, as a 
man aside from the apostle, I hold to be the 
thi*ee greatest men the world has ever known, 
and I interpret their ^nritings in the light 
thrown on them by the studies of Dr. Brown- 
son. The principles he endeavored to set forth 
will much simplify philosophy, will render un- 
necessary many questions which philosophers 
have unsuccessfully wearied themselves in at- 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 67 

tempts to solve, and furnisli the kej^ to the rec- 
onciliation of philosophy and theology and of 
faith and science. 



OHAPTEE III. 

THE THOMIST AND THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 

It was intimated some years ago by a prolific, 
if not profoundly philosophical, writer in the 
"Catholic World," that the fact that what is 
called the Thomist philosophy has been allowed 
to be tanght in Catholic schools, nncensured by 
the church, approved by heads of religious or- 
ders, held by the profoundest and most learned 
professors and doctors, gives it an authority 
which it is not lawful to question. 

The geocentric theory, I believe, was taught in 
all Catholic schools down to the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and a Roman congregation pronounced the 
heliocentric theorj^, in the case of Galileo who 
defended it, false in science and heretical in 
faith ; and yet this theory is now taught in Cath- 
olic schools and without censure. The Cartesian 
philosophy, as embodied in the Lugdunensis, 
was taught for years in Catholic schools, and 



68 FAITH AND SCIENCK 

that is almost the direct contradictorT of St„ 
Thomas. The Wolff-Leibnitzian xDhilosophv, as. 
condensed by Storchenan, was for a long time 
used as a text book in Catholic schools in Italy 
under the yery eyes of the Holy Father, al^o in 
other countries, and in religions orders, and I 
need not say that this philosophy differs widely 
from that of St. Thomas as I understand it. 
This is enough to show that the fact alleged by 
the "Catholic World" does not warrant the con- 
clusion he draws from it. 

In some of Dr. Brownson's earlier essays Mb 
thought is not always clearly and accurately 
expressed and tends to ontologism, if strictly 
taken, though that was far from his real mean- 
ing; but in his later writings he deviates in no 
respect from St. Thomas as he understood him, 
and he had studied St. Thomas perhaps mth as 
much care and diligence as Father Kleutgen or 
Mein Herr Stoeckl. There is no decision of the 
church that I know of that binds one to take 
the "Catholic World,^' any German philosopher, 
or even the illustrious Society of Jesus, in gen- 
eral anti-Thomists, as infallible authority for 
determining the meaning of St. Thomas, and 
from which there lies no appeal. 

Dr. Brownson deviates neither from the sub- 
stance of his doctrine nor the spirit of his teaeh- 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY, q 69 

ing, but utters in the language of the nineteenth 
century what the Angelic Doctor wrote in a 
style adapted to the form of thought in the thir- 
teenth, and undertakes to solve a problem which 
St. Thomas does not distinctly raise. St. Thomas 
holds that God is not per se notus, that is, the 
existence of God is not a self-evident or intuitive 
truth, but is demonstrable. So far both agree; 
God is not self-evident, or known by direct in- 
tuition, but may be proved to exist with cer- 
tainty by reasoning. The principle of this rea- 
soning or demonstration, according to St. 
Thomas, as of all reasoning, is the relation of 
cause and effect. The existence of God cannot, 
indeed, he says, be demonstrated by reasoning 
from cause to effect, but is proved by reasoning 
from effect to cause. 

But cause and effect are correratives and con- 
note each the other. When we know something 
is an effect, we know it must have and actually 
has a cause. Then how do we know or prove 
anything is an effect, or form the judgment of 
the relation of cause and effect? This is Hume's 
problem. That is, how do we get the principle 
itself of the demonstration on which St. Thomas 
relies? As far as I know, this question St. 
Thomas nowhere distinctly answers, nor even 
raises. This question, raised hj Hume, presents 



70 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

a like question witli regard to the first or neces- 
sary principles of all science. How do we come 
by them? Where in St. Thomas and the whole 
range of Thomist philosophy, or any other phi- 
losophy tanght in Catholic schools, are we to 
look for an answer? Given the relation of cause 
and effect, and given the apprehension of effect 
as effect, any one of the &ve demonstrations of 
the existence of God presented by St. Thomas 
is conclusive, but all his demonstrations leave 
his postulate unproved. 

Dr. Brownson reduced the postulate to actual 
science and established the principles of all sci- 
ence and all reality by showing by a severe an- 
alysis of thought and of the object in thought, 
that they are objective and presented intuitively 
to the mind, neither created nor supplied from 
itself to the human intellect, and that they are 
as certain as the fact that we think or exist. In 
doing this, he in no sense contradicted St. 
Thomas or questioned his philosophy. He only 
supplied a defect in that philosophy, which in- 
deed in St. Thomas's time was not felt to be a 
defect, but which has become manifestly so, as 
he shows in the essay on ^'The Principle of 
Causality.'^ Those who think it i3resumption on 
his part to suppose that he could either supply 
or detect a defect in the Thomist philosophy may 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 71 

need to be reminded that a cobbler was able to 
point out a defect in the slipper of a statue bj 
the sculptor Phidias. 

Yielding to no one in his respect for the au- 
thority of the Holy See, or in prompt and unre- 
served submission to its definitions, decisions, or 
improbations, Dr. Brownson did not always con- 
clude with Fathers Eamiere and Kleutgen, be- 
cause the Holy See improbates a doctrine which 
he rejected, that she as a matter of course ap- 
proves his, which is by no means its exact con- 
tradictory. Between it and the doctrine he de- 
fended there might be a tertium quid. He went 
as far as those excellent fathers and the writer 
in the "Catholic World,'' in holding that the 
Holy See has improbated ontologism, which he 
had always rejected, even before the Holy See 
had declared that it could not be safely taught, 
but he did not therefore conclude that the 
church gives her sanction to ps^^chologism. 
These may be opposite errors, and the condem- 
nation of the one does not necessarily imply the 
approbation of the other. 

He generally avoided using the expression, in- 
tuition of being, although in his sense of the 
word, intuition, the expression does not fall un- 
der any improbation of the Holy See yet pro- 
nounced, for he did not hold that we have in- 



72 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

tuition of being as being. The intuition is of the 
ideal, or what are called necessary truths but 
we know that these traiths are all integrated in 
real and necessary being onl}^ by reflection and 
reasoning, by no means intuitively. Far less did 
he maintain that we have in this life intuition of 
God. Without intuition of these necessary 
truths, ideas he called them, we could have no 
science, for they are the principles of all sci- 
ence. That we hold them by intuition, as pre- 
sented to the mind in sensible phantasms and 
intelligible species, might possibly be shown to 
be the doctrine of St. Thomas, and was main- 
tained by the late Dr. Ward, of the "Dublin Ke- 
view,'^ and is, if I mistake not, by most if not all 
philosophers of the Society of Jesus. 

Well, what are these necessary ideaSj or nec- 
essary truths? Are they abstractions, or are 
they real? If abstractions, they are creatures 
of the mind and of no account; if they are real, 
they are either real existences or real being. 
But they are not existences as distinguished 
from being, for then they are creatures, and no 
creature can sustain the predicate necessary or 
universal. Then they must be and are real and 
necessary being, and consequently, intuition of 
them is in reality intuition of being, though we 
know it to be being, not bv intuition, but bv re« 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 73 

flection. If in tliis, or in any question of phil- 
osopliY, he dissents from St. Thomas, he had the 
right to do so if he showed good reasons for so 
doing, but I deny that he in any respect runs 
counter to the Angelic Doctor. 

I maintain that there is no irreconcilable an- 
tagoni.sm between Dr. Brownson and St. 
Thomas in regard to the ideal formula. 
For my part, I do not think it 
would be a hopeless task for a man who un- 
derstood both to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, 
as mutually repellent as their respective sys- 
tems are commonly considered. St. Thomas is 
in the main a follower of Aristotle, and Dr. 
Brownson follows more the principles and me- 
thod of Plato, though he is less of a Platonist 
than St. Thomas is an Aristotelian or peripate- 
tic. St. Thomas rarely deviates from ^^The Philos- 
opher," except where his faith requires him to 
do so ; Dr. Brownson frequently deserts Plato for 
philosophical as well as theological reasons. St. 
Thomas is oftener cited than read, and oftener 
read than understood, and few depart more 
widely from his real sense, as far as I can judge, 
than those who profess to be his disciples. I 
speak of him here only as a philosopher, not 
as a theological doctor. Dr. Brownson was never 
understood by his opponents, and I have never 



74 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

seen any objection adduced bv any of bis critics 
tbat is an objection to any philosophical doc- 
trine that I baye eyer fonnd in bis writings. I 
may not well understand eitber Mm or St. 
Tbomas, but as I do understand tbem, tbougb 
differing widely in tbeir metbod and in tbe point 
of yiew from wbicb tbey consider tbe same ques- 
tions, tbey are on no essential point antagonistic 
one to tbe otber. 

St. Tbomas asks, "Utrum Deum esse sit per se 
notum/' wbetber tbat Grod is may be known per 
se, tbat is, immediately known, and answers, in 
se, yes; quoad nos, no. Therefore it is said tbat 
God is not affirmed to us, as Dr. Brownson main- 
tains, in ideal intuition. Tbis conclusion is not 
warranted, for tbe knowledge of wbicb St. 
Tbomas speaks is knowledge in tbe reflectiye 
order, and Dr. Brownson neyer pretends tbat 
any man from intuition can say, God is, and 
herein he differs from the ontologists, like Fa- 
ther Rothenflue, Father Fournier, and the 
school of Louyain; all he pretends is tbat the 
idea is intuitiye, and by reflection on it as repre- 
sented in language we discoyer that the idea is 
real being, and therefore God. What eyer is in- 
tuitiye is tbat which is God, not tbat God is. 
Now tbis St. Thomas nowhere denies, but actu- 
ally asserts, or at least, implies it in the yery 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 75 

article we liaye referred to, when replying to an 
objection based on the assertion of St. John 
Damascen, that the cognition of the existence of 
God is inserted natnrally in all men, for he says 
that the cognition that God is, in a general and 
confused sense, in the respect that he is man's 
beatitude, is natnrally inserted in us, for man 
natnrally desires beatitude, and what is natu- 
rally desired by man is naturally known by him. 
"Inserta est in nobis," inserted in us, is only an- 
other form of saying, is intuitiyely affirmed to 
us, or presented to us in ideal intuition, and 
whether he is affirmed as bonum or as ens makes 
no difference as to the fact of his being intui- 
tively presented to the mind. But the holy doc- 
tor rightl}^ adds that this is not to know that 
God is, as to know some one is coming is not 
to know Peter, although Peter is actually com- 
ing. 

God is not, says St. Thomas, ^^per se notus," 
but that he is can be demonstrated by his ef- 
fects. Effects manifest their causes, and hence 
we proceed from the effect to the cause. Thus 
God is, is demonstrable from his works, as says 
St. Paul, the invisible things of God, even his 
eternal power and divinity, are clearly seen, be- 
ing understood by the things that are made. 
This passage from St. Paul is the sole proof St. 



76 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

Thomas adduces tliat tlie existence of God is 
demonstrable from liis effects, or works, and yet 
St. Paul in this text asserts nothing of the sort. 
What he asserts is that the invisible things of 
God, his iDower and divinity, that is, character 
and attributes, are clearly seen from the foun- 
dation of the world, being understood by the 
things that are made, and this was all he had 
occasion to assert, for he was not arguing 
against those who deny that God is, but showing 
that those who know that he is are mthout ex- 
cuse for failing to recognize his real character 
and attributes, and giving the glorj that is his 
due to the corruptible creature, four-footed 
beasts, and creeping things (Sum. TheoL, P. 1, 
Q. 1, A. 1, 2.) 

The nature and character of the cause are 
manifested from the effect, as we say the work- 
man is known by his work, or as our Lord says, 
ye shall know them by their fruits. So where 
the question is Quid est Dens, we answer it by 
referring to his works which reveal him, that is, 
paii:ially answer it, for God does not exhaust 
himself in creation; so far from it that the 
Psalmist, i)ointing to his works, says they are 
but "the hiding of his power." But to the ques- 
tion. An sit Deus, the effects answer if we know 
them to be effects. The effect, unless appre- 



THOMIST AMD SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 77 

liended as an effect, cannot answer, and if ap- 
prehended as an effect, it does not demonstrate 
tlie cause, but connotes it. Cause and effect are 
correlatives, as I have said before, and correla- 
tives do not imply, they connote one another, 
and we cannot pronounce a thing an effect and 
proceed from it to the existence of a cause un- 
less we know that it is caused, which we cannot 
know without knowing that it has a cause, 
though what cause we may not be able to say. 
8t. Thomas was too profound a philosopher and 
too able a logician not to know that the mind 
must be in possession of the categories of cause 
and effect before it can pronounce this thing a 
cause and that thing an effect, and either deduce 
the effect from its knowledge of the cause, or 
induce the cause from its knowledge of the ef- 
fect. Whence comes it then that he says the 
existence of God can be demonstrated by way of 
induction from the works of creation? 

It is because he assumes that the mind is al- 
ready in i>ossession of the categories of cause 
and effect, as well as the other categories under 
which the mind must apprehend whatever it 
does apprehend, and the mind apprehending 
contingents under the categoiy of effect is able 
at once to assert the category of the cause, and 
from the nature and character of the effect to 



78 FAITH AND SCTEXCE. 

pronounce that the catise is God. Hence the 
appositeness of this qitotation from St. Patilj, 
which otherwise, as I hare shoTm, cotild not 
hare been at all to his pnrpose. This process is 
perfectly tnie and logical. Btit this shows that 
the qtiestion St. Thomas is discnssing is not at 
all the cxtiestion inTolved in the ideal intuition 
asserted by Dr. Brownson, as they who deny 
that the ideal formtila is inttiitive suppose. 
This question lies further back, and is a ques- 
tion as to the categories themselyes, a question, 
which, as far as I recollect, St. Thomas nowhere 
disctisses. He takes them from Aristotle as the 
necessary forms of logic, without which there is 
no cognition, and no reason or reasoning. As 
far as I hare read the works of St. Thomas, he 
leaves the qtiestion of the categories, or predica- 
ments, just where they were left by Aristotle, as 
the necessary forms of logic, without determin- 
ing the question how the mind obtains them, or 
whether they are real or only formal. He of 
course held that they are in the mind, or present 
to the mind, prior to experience, and are the 
necessary conditions, the a-priori element, of 
every fact of experience. But I do not find that 
he ever enters into any discussion of the ques- 
tion of their origin, though he evidently does 
not hold that they are obtained by the mind, or 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 79 

imposed by it on the object, as Kant pretends. 
He considered them, no donbt, logical forms, 
giving the law to all knowledge, as they nnques- 
tionably are. Yet had the question come up as 
to the identity of the logical order with the real, 
he wonld haye answered, as in the kindred case 
of nniyersals, logic exists in the mind with a 
foundation in reality, which answer may be ac- 
cepted, for logic is both formal, and real. The 
ideal formula is only the reduction of the cate- 
gories of the peripatetics to two, being and ex- 
istences, and their relation — I say two, not 
three, for the relation is in the related, and the 
creatiye act of God is asserted in asserting, not 
God, which would be pantheism, but existences, 
identifying them with the real, and asserting 
that they are giyen, or immediately affirmed, by 
the real itself to the mind, which is what we 
call intuition, which as I haye said, is not an 
act of the subject, but of the object, or God cre- 
ating the mind and giving it the principles nec- 
essary to its activity as intelligent subject. 

The formula is called ideal in a sense analo- 
gous to that of Plato, who calls the intelligible 
object idea, and because it is presented to the 
understanding as idea, or as the ideal part of 
our knowledge as distinguished from the experi- 
mental or empirical. 



80 FAITH AXD SCTE^XE. 

Plato had asserted ideac? and their reality. 
The idea was the real thing which nitist be 
known in order to have real science. The sen- 
sible, the individnal. the changeable, was in his 
language mimesis, and of no valtie in science 
save as directing tis to the methexis, as the copy 
or imitation directs tis to the original. The 
methexis is the i:)articipation of things of the 
divine ideas, in which is the real object of all 
science. Thus far Plato may be followed safely 
if we add that the mimesis is no lec>s real than 
the methexis, and imitates the methexis as the 
methexis imitates being, or G-od. the place, as 
Leibnitz says, of ideas. But instead of making 
the methexics the participation of the divine 
ideas through the creative act of God, Plato 
made it the impre>ssion given by those ideas to 
pre-existing matter, as the impression of the 
seal on wax. This impression is the exact imi- 
tation of the divine idea, and from it we know 
the divine idea itcvelf, and thus by rising through 
the mimesis to the methexi-s we rise to the di- 
vine ideal, to Being, which is being in itself. 
The really wise man stops at none of these de- 
grees, not at the matter, not at the imiu-ession, 
but rising on the wingcs of intelligence and love, 
soars to Being in it.^elf, the tii\st good and the 
first fair, in which the sotil will find her home 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 81 

and regain the freedom, grandeur, and glory she 
had before she was imprisoned in matter, or 
nnited to body. The trouble here is that noth- 
ing is real save eternal being and eternal mat- 
ter. 

The term ideal ie taken in the formula as ob- 
jective, not as subjective, and as the ideal which 
precedes experience and renders experience pos- 
sible, and what in every act of knowledge really 
enters as the necessary and apodictic element 
of human knowledge, and constitutes the basis 
of all demonstration, whether in metaphysics, 
mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics, or in the 
physical sciences, as cosmology, geology, chem- 
istry, electricity, mechanics, physiology, philol- 
ogy, zoology, biolog}^, sociology, etc. The for- 
mula is a priori, not empirical, and enters inta 
all empirical science as its non-empirical ele- 
ment. 

Now if you take any fact of understanding, or 
as the moderns say, a fact of consciousness, and 
analyze it, as Kant has done in his Criticism of 
Pure Reason, you will find in it a necessary ele- 
ment which enters into every intellectual fact,, 
or thought, and a contingent or empirical ele- 
ment, and the necessary element is precisely the 
ideal formula, that is to say, whatever i» 
thought is thought as necessary or as contin- 



32 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

gent, and what is tliouglit as contingent is 
thougM as the product of the necessary or non- 
contingent, or in language perhaps more famil- 
iar to modern ears, to every fact of consciousness 
there is necessary as the condition of its produc- 
tion the a-priori ideas of the necessary, the con- 
tingent, and of the creative act which places the 
contingent. 

^ow bear in mind that abstractions are nul- 
lities, have no objective existence, are formed by 
the mind operating on the concrete objects pre- 
sented intuitively or otherwise, and are appre- 
hended only in the concrete, and that only con- 
crete being or reality can be presented in intui- 
tion, and you at once perceive that the intuition 
of the ideal or of these a-priori ideas is the in- 
tuition of concrete reality. Thus you have the 
ideal formula, ens creat existentias, or real be- 
ing creates existences. 

In the first place, this formula contains the 
principle of all the real and all the knowable, 
for all the real must come under the head of 
being, existences, and the relation of existences 
to being. What is not Grod is creature, and 
what is not creature is God, and creatures can 
be distinguished from God and yet exist only 
by the creative act of God, the nexus that at 
once distinguishes and connects them. It gives 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 83 

the principle of all the knowable, omne scibile, 
because what is not, or what is destitute of 
reality, is unintelligible. We can only know be- 
ing and that which exists by the act of being. 
The formula is then complete, both in the order 
of being and in the order of science. 

But all facts of knowledge, what w^e call sci- 
ence, include both the idea and the fact, and 
every fact includeis the ideal or necessary and the 
contingent, and facts are not given intuitively 
save as contained in their most general or uni- 
versal principle, and are obtainable only empiri- 
cally, by observation and experience, as all phi- 
losophers except Platonists and neo-Platonists 
have always asserted, and as the common sense 
of mankind agrees. The ideal formula includes 
all that is given intuitively and this gives us 
only the ideal element of knowledge, that which 
Is the a-priori element of experience, and which 
is the necessary, persisting, and invariable part 
of every fact of knowledge. It gives all knowl- 
edge in universo, as say the schoolmen, but never 
the knowledge of things in particular. Gioberti, 
in establishing his formula, departed not so 
widely from the scholastics as his admirers have 
thought or pretended, nor made any new discov- 
ery in philosophical science. What he has done 
is to collect and set forth in a distinct and 



84: FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

etrictly scientific formula what is everywliere as- 
sumed by St. Thomas and underlies all his philo- 
sophical reasoning, and is given as the principle 
of all the philosophical solutions he offer.s. 

I said the ideal formula expresses the princi- 
ples of all the real and all the knowable, and all 
the knowable because all the real. Whatever is 
or exists is either God or creature; there is no 
middle term conceivable or possible; and hence 
the objective reason, in which Cousin integrates 
absolute or necessary ideas, and which he allows 
to be neither God nor man, but represents as 
something intermediary between God and crea- 
ture, is an impossible reason. So the ens in 
genere, being in general, of Kosmini, one of the 
profoundest psychologists of modern times, and 
which he says is neither God nor creature, is a 
nullity. What is not in the one category either 
is nothing or it is in the other. Cousin, when he 
reduced the categories of Kant and Aristotle to 
substance and cause, taking cause for the 
caused, did much to simplify philosophy and to 
advance it; but when he resolved the whole 
ideal into the idea of the true, the beautiful, 
and the, good, he omitted the whole second class 
of ideas, for the true, the beautiful, and the good 
are being under different phases. The sumnuua 
verum, summum pulchrum, and summum bo- 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 85 

num, are identically eiimmum ens. Hence the 
charge of pantheism justly brought against his; 
philosophy. To escape this charge he says Go-l 
is substance, but substance only in that he is 
cause, as he is cause only in that he is substance, 
which makes God necessarily a cause and cre- 
ation an evolution or emanation of himself, and 
no creation at all, but simply a subtler form of 
pantheism. This is the case with all the exclu- 
siye ontologists. If the ideal is being only we 
can in our science assert only being. The on- 
tologists mutilate the ideal by cutting off the 
contingent, the creature, and the psychologists 
mutilate it by cutting off being and giving us 
for God, not being, but a generalization, an ab- 
straction, a nullity. It, the ideal formula, must 
embrace both being and contingent existenccis, 
or science is impossible. But God and creature, 
or being, existence, and their real relation em- 
brace all the real, and hence in the formula is 
Intuitively given the principle of all the real and 
all the knowable. The contingent cannot be pre- 
sented as being because it is not being, and 
therefore must be presented, if at all, as con- 
tingent; that is, in its real relation to being or 
God. It is the intuition of existences in their 
relation to God that forms the principle or basis 
of the whole inductive philosophy, and especial- 



86 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

ly of the a-posteriori argument to prove the ex- 
istence of God. This argument would have no 
force or yaliditj, if the contingent were not lield 
intuitiyely as contingent, and therefore in its 
real relation to being, real and necessary being. 
This relation is that of the effect to the cause, 
because it can be no other. The contingent can 
proceed from the non-contingent, existence from 
being, only by way of the creative act of being. 
Hence the ideal, that which precedes experi- 
ence, and without which there could be no fact 
of knowledge, and which is creative and consti- 
tutive of the intellect, and enters as an essen- 
tial element into every thought, fact of con- 
sciousness, or cognition, has been expressed in 
the formula. Real and necessary being creates 
existences, or God creates the heaven .md the 
earth and all things visible and invisible. 

That this formula is true no Christian theolo- 
gian doubts or is i)ermitted to doubt, for it is 
simply the first verse of Genesis, and the first 
article of the Mcene Creed; but that it is given 
intuitively has been very earnestly disputed, be- 
cause they who oppose it mean one thing by in- 
tuition and they who assert its intuitive affirma- 
tion mean another. The ideal asserted in the 
formula is certainly a-priori, and therefore in- 
tuitive, and all arguments against either athe- 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 87 

ism or pantheism, or to the existence of God or 
the fact of creation assume it, or depend on it 
as their principle, and the considerations pre- 
sented show that it is not and cannot be the cre- 
ation of the mind itself, nor mere forme of the 
understanding, unless jou assume that Man is 
Ood, and as God, is his own subject and object, 
therefore self-existent and self-sufficing. But 
nobody pretends that the mind knows intuitive- 
ly that the ideal is God and his creative act. 
Though God affirms himself in immediate intu- 
ition we do not know intuitively that what is 
affirmed is God, and therefore the formula as a 
formula is not intuitive, but that which is ex- 
pressed by the formula is intuitive, because it 
is prior to experience, to every intellectual act, 
and without it there would and could be no hu- 
man intellect capable of acting or experiencing. 
Therefore it must have been presented intui- 
tively, since the mind could not exist and oper- 
ate to find or invent it without it as its principle 
of existence and operation. The mind could no 
more find, invent, or obtain it than a man or any 
other creature could create himself or itself. Its 
affirmation, not by, but to, the understanding is 
necessary to create and constitute the intellect, 
and prior to it the man as an intelligent soul 
does not exist. It is impossible, then, that what 



38 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

is expressed by the formula could have been ob- 
tained by discursion, bv inference, by dednctioni 
or induction, and therefore conld be obtained 
only as directly and immediately affirmed by 
the Creator himself. So mnch for the contents. 
of the formula, if I may so speak, the ideas of 
being, existence, and of the creative act or cau- 
sation. 

But that these ideas are identically being cre- 
ating existences, or the ideal being is God, T)r. 
Brownson does not pretend any more than do 
his peripatetic opponents. This is ascertained 
by the human mind reflecting through the aid 
of language which re-presents it, on the divine 
affirmations intuitively presented, which are the 
basis of all the demonstrations of the existence 
of God and of the fact of creation given us by 
St. Anselm, St. Thomas, Suarez, Fenelon, and 
philosophers and theologians universally. The 
ideal goes before knowledge, as that which 
renders understanding possible, and is present" 
ed immediately and directly as the immediate 
object and light of the intellect; the formula or 
scientific statement of what the divine judgment 
expresses is obtained by reflection, study, care- 
ful analysis of the facts of consciousness; in a 
word, experience; but it never could even in this 
way be arrived at had it not been re-presented 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 89 

to the mind by revelation through the medium 
of language, the indispensable instrument of 
all reflective thought. The child, the savage, the 
unlettered rustic has present to his mind what 
the formula states, but only those who have the 
Holy Scriptures and have learned the Creed and 
the Catechism have the formula and can say 
ens creat existentias. 

The formula has been objected to on the 
ground that it assumes that ens, the subject of 
the judgment, is real and necessary being, that 
is, God himself, for it is contended that though 
ens, or being, is the first object of the intellect, 
yet it may be possible being as well as real be- 
ing; but this objection has been already answer- 
ed in showing that only the real can affirm it- 
self. The objection grows out of the .supposition 
that the intuition is subjective, whereas it is 
here taken as an objective fact, and is tlie act 
not of the intellect, but of the object creating 
and constituting the intellect, and consequently 
only the real can be the object intuitively affirm- 
ed, because only the real is active, capable of 
acting. The possible is that which may exist, 
but does not, and is apprehensible only ia the 
reality that can give it existence, or has the 
ability to realize it. 

The formula is still further objected to in that 



90 FAITH AXD SCIE^XE. 

it supposes the creative act to be intuitiTel}' 
present to the mind. It may "be conclnded dis- 
cursiyelT, "btit not affirmed by tis intuitively. If 
inttiition be taken as otu' act, not as the act of 
the object showing itself to ns, certainly not> 
but it must be recollected that the principle of 
all logical conclusions, of all the demonstra- 
tions of science, is the ideal inttiitively present- 
ed, and if the creative act were not so presented 
it could not be conchided, demonstrated, or 
proved. Creatures are contingent, not necessary 
existences; they cannot stand alone, and cannot 
be asserted without asserting that which is not 
creature, which is not contingent, but necessary, 
and then only by asserting their relarion to the 
necessary, and as only the real can aftinu itself 
intuitively, only the real relation can be assert- 
ed, and the contingent can bear no other rela- 
tion to the necessary but that of creature to ere* 
ator. That relation is the creative act, and there- 
fore the creatiA'e act is intuitively affirmed in 
affirming the relation of the contingent to the 
necessary, existences to being. This is no noA'- 
elty, but is the asstimj)tion of all who undertake 
to prove the real existence of a created universe^ 
That the ideal basis, or the principlevS of all 
human science, is intuitive is held by all great 
philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, St. Au- 



THOMIST AND SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 91 

gnstine, St. Thomas, St. Bonayenture, Male- 
branclie, Leibnitz, Fenelon, Gerdil, and Gioberti. 
It is from tlie intuitive idea of the most perfect 
being intuitively present to the mind that St. 
Aniselm draws the argument for the existence 
of God alike in his Monologium and in his Pros- 
logium. Kosmini, in this respect, agrees with the 
others and professes to derive all our science 
from the intuition of being, although he and 
some others very inconsistently make the intui- 
tive idea the idea of being in general, or ens in 
genere, which is an abstraction formed by the 
mind and in no sense an intuition. The mind 
cannot create, invent, or find its own principles 
of science, because it cannot operate or exist 
without principiles, and first principles must 
therefore be given intuitively. This is evident 
of itself. 

St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, Gerdil, and 
Gioberti, especially the last, are very generally 
understood to maintain that we know God in- 
tuitively, and not a few read the ideal formula 
as if it were, Deus creat existentias, God creates 
existences, but none of these philosophers, so 
far as I can understand them, maintains any- 
thing of the sort. What they assert is that the 
idea is intuitive, but that the idea is God none 
of them pretend to know by intuition. This Is 



92 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

known only by reflection, by the operations of 
the understanding itself. The ideal formula as 
given by Gioberti is not Dens, but ens creat ex- 
istentias, Tente crea Tesistente. The identity 
of rente, or ens, mth God is not giyen intuitiye- 
ly, but is obtained by reasoning , and is what we 
really do in demonstrating the existence of God, 
or that God is. Dr. Brownson, on this point, as 
to what is intnitiyely giyen, asserts nothing St. 
Thomas denies when he denies that Deiim esse 
sit per se notum. Things, says St. Thomas, are 
said to be kno^Ti per se, or, as we say in Eng- 
lish, self-eyident, in a twofold sense, the one 
secundum se, or as to themselyes, and non quoad 
nos, or as to us, or both as to themselyes and 
as to us. Any proposition is known per se w^hen 
the predicate is included in the subject, as Man 
is an animal, for animal is included in man. If 
therefore what is the predicate and what is the 
subject be known to all the proposition will be 
known to all (or self-eyident), as appears from 
the first principles of demonstration, the terms 
of which are certain common conceptions of 
which no one is ignorant, such as being and not 
being (ens et non-ens), the whole and the part, 
and the like. But if there are persons who are 
ignorant of what is the predicate and what the 
subject, the proposition will still be known per 



THOMIST AI^D SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 93 

se, or self-eyident, yet not to tliem. Hence Boe- 
tius says there are certain general concep- 
tions of the soul, as that incorporeals are not in 
place, which are known per se, or self-evddent, 
<only to the learned. I say therefore that the 
proposition God is, Deus est, is know^n per se 
as to itself, quantnm in se est, since God is his 
own being or esse; but inasmuch as we know 
not what God is, it is not known per se to us, 
or to us as a self-evident proposition, but needs 
to be demonstrated by means of things iimre 
evident to us, though less evident in themselvet^, 
namely, effects. 

I have cited this passage from the second 
question of the First Part of the Sumna Theo- 
logica because it is supposed to be contradicted 
by the ideal intuition asserted by Dr. Brownson, 
but he does not maintain anything contrary to 
it, for he never i3retends that the proposition, 
God is, is a self-evident proposition to us, and 
is known of itself as soon as it is announced, and 
in no need of being proved or demonstrated. 
He may not agree with St. Thomas as to the pro- 
cess of demonstration, but he agrees entirely 
with him that it needs to be demonstrated. But 
St. Thomas asserts in this passage that the hrst 
principles of demonstration are intuitive and 
includes among them being and not-being, the 



94 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

whole and the part, and the like. All that Gio- 
berti has done is to compress within a formula 
comprehensive and exact this ideal intuition 
on which all theologians, philosophers, and lo- 
gicians base their demonstrations, and to show 
that the demonstrations are solid and conclu- 
sive by showing that the ideal on which they 
are based is objective and real, which is, after 
all only what Plato and St. Augustine had. 
done, or, at least, asserted, before him. 

St. Thomas agrees with Dr. Brownson in as- 
serting the reality of the ideal, or the intelligi- 
ble, for he says (Ubi Supra, Q. 87) that the 
object known is the real or the actual, not the 
possible, just as* in sensible perception the eye 
does not see that which may be colored, but that 
which is colored. He teaches, further, that the 
human mind in the order of intelligibles is only 
in potentia, or possible, and becomes an actual 
or real mind by the act of the intelligible object; 
that the intelligible is superior to the intellect, 
and brings it from possibility to actuality, that 
is, actualizes it, or creates it, precisely ^hat Dr. 
Brownson maintains, and from which we Ic-arn 
that the soul is created, and not, as Dr, Fros- 
chammer was condemned at Kome for asserting, 
generated. 

With these explanatory remarks on the phil- 



RATIONALISM. 95- 

osophical principle and metliod followed in the 
present work, we may now proceed to the prob- 
lem we haye proposed for solution. 



OHAPTEE ly. 



RATIONALISM. 



Eationalism is so called from ratio, reason. 
It is divided into pure and impure. Pure ration- 
alism is the doctrine that man's natural reason 
suffices for itself, and solves all the problems of 
life that are solvable without aid received or 
needed from supernaturail revelation. Impure 
rationalism does not deny, it indeed professes 
to assert supernatural revelation, but ccmtends- 
that nothing is revealed that is above reason^ 
or that when revealed reason cannot by her own 
light freely comprehend or judge of both as to 
its intrinsic truth and meaning. 

Pure rationalists differ much among them- 
selves, but all agree in maintaining that reason 
is self-sufficing, in rejecting with disdain or con- 
tempt all pretensions to a divine revelation, and 
deny as unreal everything that professes to 
transcend the natural world. Nature is all that 



'96 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

is or exists, and beside it there is and can be 
notMng. All tliat is knowable in nature can be 
known bj the riglit use of reason and the senses. 
The impure rationalists admit a supernatural 
God and creator of the universe, who reveals to 
us not mysteries, but the simple law of nature, 
which lies wholly within the sphere of reason. 
-St. Thomas maintains in his "Contra Gentiles," 
that the choice minds of the race, the learned 
and the highly cultivated might find out and 
know the natural law by reason alone, but the 
mass of mankind could not, and that for them 
its divine revelation is necessary. The impure 
rationalists agree so far with St. Thomas, but 
reject his teaching when he asserts not only su- 
pernatural revelation of the law of nature or the 
intelligible, but the supernatural revelation (^f 
the superintelligible, or mysteries which remain 
mysteries after revelation. They deny all revela- 
tion of anything which when revealed is above 
reason, and consequently the whole supernatu- 
ral order. Revelation serves them as grace serves 
the Pelagians; they can do with it nothing which 
they could not, strictly speaking, do without it, 
but more easily with than without it. Moreover, 
with them revelation is needed at all only in tbe 
infancy of the race, and in proportion as the 
race advance and come to the mature :^xercV>e 



RATIONALISM 97 

of their reason, there is no longer any uacessity^ 
of revelation, and religion itself is transformed 
into philosophy. So that they in reality, the pure 
and impure rationalists, differ only temporarily 
as to the means of knowing and not at all as to 
the objects known or believed. 

Eeason, is certainly common to all men, and 
is the natural light of the human understanding^ 
without which no man could have any intelli- 
gence, or any intellectual or moral life. Some 
psychologists make reason and understanding 
identical, and regard them as our intellectual 
faculty, or power of knowing. Others distin- 
guish them, and make reason and understand- 
ing, the Vernunft and the Yerstand of the Ger- 
mans, two distinct faculties of the soul without 
mental dependence the one on the other. Kant 
and most Germans since Kant distinguish them. 
Cousin and the French eclectics identify them^ 
and hold that reason is our only faculty of in- 
telligence, that by which we know all that we 
do know, whatever its sphere, its object, or de- 
gree. The psychological question is of no great 
importance to our present purpose, but is not 
without its bearing on the capacities of crea- 
tures like the dog, the horse, the rat, and various 
other animals to which it is hardly possible to 
deny every degree of intelligence, and to whom 



^8 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

it is still harder to concede any degree of reason. 
Beason and understanding may be tlie same, or, 
rather, understanding may be reason in man, 
but yet, in some sense, in their nature distin- 
guishable. Be this as it may, reason is at least 
the light of the soul and the characteristic, or 
differentia, as say the schoolmen, of man, who is 
usually defined a rational animal, whether It is 
so because what is simple intelligence in ani- 
mals is transformed into reason in him, or be- 
cause reason is really distinct from understand- 
ing, it may be difficult to decide. Perhaps un- 
derstanding should be taken as the subjective 
faculty, and reason not as a subjective faculty, 
but as the objective light which informs the 
subjective faculty and makes it understanding. 
This whole question of reason is important and 
interesting, but it suflftces to say here, what no- 
body will seriously question, that all men have 
reason, or the light of reason, in some degTee, 
and without it there is no understanding, no iii- 
tellectual life, no proper human acts, or acts 
done by the man himself and for which he is 
morally responsible. 

We know only by reason, and consequently 
can know nothing above reason and belicTe 
nothing that is unreasonable. Whatever lies 
above the plane of reason and is unillumined by 



RATIONALISM. 99 

the liglit of reason is to us superintelligible, and 
whatever contradicts that which is so illumined 
or is known by reason is to us absolutely incred- 
ible. To say of any proposition that it is unrea- 
sonable is the same as to say it is unintelligible; 
and to say that it is unintelligible is the same as 
to say that it is unreal, untrue, false, nothing at 
all. It can neither be known nor believed. No 
man does or can know what is unreal or f al^^e, 
for it is nothing, and nothing can be no object 
of knowledge; so also no man believes or *..an 
believe what appears to his understanding to 
be unreasonable, or to contradict his reason. 
The word of God is ample and conclusive author- 
ity for any and every proposition for which we 
really have it, for it is impossible for God to lie ; 
iDut the fact that a given proposition is unrea- 
sonable or against reason is conclusive evidence 
that for that proposition we have not the woid 
of God. The proof of its falsity is stronger tl an 
any possible proof that God has revealed or as- 
serted it. 

Hence we gain this important result, that 
there never is and never can be any real antag- 
onism between faith and reason, for no man ever 
does or can believe what conflicts, really con- 
flicts we mean, with his reason. No niaii does 
or can believe the Christian mysteries so long as 



100 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

to his understanding they appear to be unrea- 
sonable, and before he does or can explicitly be- 
lieve them he must be enabled to see that,, 
though above reason and incomprehensible by 
reason, they are yet not unreasonable or contra- 
dictory to reason. So far the rationalists are 
right in principle, and no depreciation of reason 
as a false and deceptive light, no exaltation of 
revelation at the expense of reason, can make 
them T\Tong. We may mistake other lights for 
that of reason, but reason herself is a true light,, 
and never misleads or deceives. The Intellect,, 
St. Thomas maintains, is never false, and error- 
proceeds from ignorance, not intelligence. Faith 
is distinguishable from knowledge, is an intel- 
lectual act, is in the intellect, as St. Thomas as- 
serts, as its subject, tanquam in subjecto, and 
can be no more false or deceptive than reason 
herself. 

But the rationalists forget that a thing n.a\ 
be above reason mthout being contrary to rea- 
son, and that what is above reason may be es- 
sential to the existence and operation of reason,, 
even in relation to matters which are not above 
it. By rejecting as unreal all beyond and above 
natural reason, or at least by denying the reve- 
lation to faith of anything above the plane of 
reason or the intelligible, the rationalists are far 



RATIONALISM. 101 

from ecaping from all difficulties and coiitradio 
tions. Reason, all men feel, has her limits and 
is unable to enlighten all reality. Logicians say 
de non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem 
est ratio, but the human mind is far from believ- 
ing that beyond what appears to us there is no 
existence, nothing real. No man confounds the 
unknown which everywhere confronts us, with 
the unreal or unexisting; and every active mind 
is ever driven on by the unquenchable thirst of 
knowledge to assail the unknown. Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, the ablest writer of the rationalistic 
school in Great Britain, if not in all Europe, 
does not venture to deny that the division of the 
universe which he calls the unknowable — ^he 
should have written superintelligible — is real, 
and in the unknowable he places the root, the 
origin and causes of things, which for ought we 
know or can know may be very real. The phi- 
losopher, he contends, cannot deny that they are, 
but as they are unknowable he can make no ac- 
count of them and must proceed to construct his 
science precisely as if they were not, because to 
him being unknowable they are not and can 
have no place in human science. Human science 
can be true only relatively to man, and he should 
learn to give up all aspiration to absolute sci- 
ence. When we have drawn clearly and dis- 



102 -iFAlTH AND SCIENCE. 

tinctlj the line that defines the knowable, we 
must leave all bejond it, as beyond the bounds 
of science. 

All this may seem facile and wise to the ra- 
tionalist or poeitivist, but the human mind re- 
fuses to be restricted to the intelligible, and in 
spite of everything it will regard Mr. Herbert 
Spencer's unknowable as superintelligible. The 
philosophers who would confine the soul in her 
aspirations and beliefs to the world which is 
knowable to us have never been able to succeed. 
She does not doubt and cannot doubt if she 
would that there is more than she is able to 
know, and that she has in herself capacities not 
yet realized or realizable in the order of nature. 
Man has wants that the intelligible does not and 
cannot satisfy; in the language of the eloquent 
Ohanning, "he thirsts for an unbounded good," 
and with more or less energy, with more or less 
wisdom, he unceasingly strives for it. Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton maintains with the sturdiness of 
his character that man has no power to think 
the infinite, but certain it is that the soul craves 
that which only the infinite can satisfy, never 
can she be filled with the finite. The eye is 
never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with 
hearing. The more a man knows, the more he 
hungers and thirsts to know; the more the eye 



RATIONALISM. 103 

sees, tlie more lie sees there is to be seen which. 
is as jet unseen and invisible. Give a man all 
the good things of this world and they soon pall 
upon his senses, and he turns from them in dis- 
gust or clings to them without deriving any sat- 
isfaction or pleasure from them. Even human 
love, pure and holy as it may be preserved, never 
suffices for human love. 

Love may be exhausted, it may lose its ful- 
ness, it may die, and the soul deplore the loss of 
that which when present gave her no pleasure. 
The soul is never satisfied vdth what it has, and 
is always seeking after that which it has not. 

Alway it asketh, asketh, 
And each answer is a lie. 

So take thy quest through nature, 
It through thousand natures ply; 

Ask on, thou clothed eternity; 
Time is the false reply. 
There is no true good, no real satisfaction for 
the soul of man, or for man himself, that is finite 
and restricted to the world of time and space, 
and no man ever felt it more keenly than the 
pantheistic or naturalistic author of that New 
England poem, the Sphinx. "Time is the false 
reply." You deceive yourself, O man, if you 
think the world and its phenomena, man and 
his theories, woman and her love, can answer 



104 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

your ceaseless questioning, or fill up the void 
within your heart. The lesson is as old as the- 
ages, and the fact on which it is founded is indis- 
putable and indestructible. 

Philosophers, sages, theologians, moralists, 
preachers in all nations, and in all ages, have 
taken notice of the fact that man is not and 
cannot either in his desire for knowledge, in his 
craving for love, or his hunger and thiri^t for 
good, be satisfied with what the rationalist calls 
the knowable and which is naturally attainable^ 
and Solomon after having plucked the choicest 
flowers and gathered the richest fruits that na- 
ture bears, exclaimed in terms which all experi- 
ence echoes, Yanitas vanitatum et omnia van- 
itas, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The origin 
and cause of this fact which inspires much of the 
poetry and underlies all the tragedy of life, thi& 
is not the place to explain; but it certainly indi- 
cates in the soul a sense, a feeling, a belief, that 
there is a superintelligible world as real and as. 
necessary to us as the intelligible world. We 
know not by natural reason what it is, nor how 
it may be attained to or possessed, but that it is^ 
and that our beatitude, the fulfilment of our 
existence is in it, the soul is firmly persuaded, 
and fire and water will not beat her out of her 
persuasion. Hence in all ages and nations we 



RATIONALISM. 105 

find mankind asserting the reality of the unseen 
and the invisible^ and holding it to be the chief 
aim of life to maintain proper relations with it. 
Rationalists do not pretend to deny the fact 
noted, but seek to escape its force by attributing 
it to superstition, or priestcraft which has per- 
verted human nature, or clothed it with false 
habits. This were very well, only priestcraft, as 
every other craft, must have some real principle 
on which it operates, and which it perverts to 
base and selfish purposes, or it would be power- 
less; supenstition is only the misapplication of 
a principle it neither invents nor creates, and 
so far from originating the fact noted, it is itself 
only an abuse of that fact. If there were not in 
the soul the belief that there is a reality that 
transcends the intelligible there could be no 
more superstition than religion, for superstition 
is simply a sin against religion by way of excess. 
Has education originated it? Education can 
only draw forth what is in the soul, or infuse 
into it what it has the capacity and aptitude to 
receive. You could hardly by any possible train- 
ing generate a similar fact in your dog or your 
horse. Then whence could the educators them- 
selves get their first notion of it, or their ability 
to teach it? The educators could get it only 
from educators, and who gave it to the first edu- 



106 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

cators? If the human soul had not in it some 
intimation of the supernatural, some belief in 
its reality, though ignorant of what it is, there 
could be in men nothing from which supersti- 
tion could be developed or evolved normally or 
abnormally. All religion supposes a superintel- 
ligible reality, and that man has in some way, 
naturally or supernaturally, a relation more or 
less intimate with the unseen and invisible. 
Scholars and thinkers highly esteemed by the 
age, and who would scorn to be taken as believ- 
ers in the divine inspiration of the Old and New 
Testaments, have in our own day ^rritten elab- 
orate and really erudite works to prove that the 
religious sentiment is natural to man, and is as 
universal and as indestructible as human nature 
itself; and as they identify the religious senti- 
ment with the mysterious fact noted, their testi- 
mony goes for whatever it is worth to prove the 
fact itself a natural psychical fact, as it in some 
sense really is. 

I draw here no argument to prove the exist- 
ence of this fact or faculty of the soul in favor of 
the truth of religion of any sort, or to prove that 
there is beyond the intelligible a superintellig- 
ible reality. It may or may not create a pre- 
sumption that there is, but all that I pretend to 
prove by it is that the human mind does not be- 



RATIONALISM. 107 

lieve and cannot be made to belieye, or be satisr 
fied to believe reason is unlimited, or tbat ber in- 
tellectual powers are adequate to tbe cognition 
of all reality. Here in tbe outset is a grave diffi- 
culty for pure rationalism for wbicb its own 
principles can furnisb no solution, and wbicb 
places it, witbout otber ligbt tban its own, in 
contradiction witb itself, and proves tbat ration- 
alism does not suffice for rationalism. 

Moreover, tbat stauncb rationalist, M^. Her- 
bert Spencer, wbo would not willingly eitber de- 
ceive bimself or mislead bis readers, banisbee to 
tbe category of tbe unknowable, or unintelli- 
gible, all questions relating to tbe origin, prin- 
ciple, and causes of tbings, and restricts tbe 
knowable to sensible or material facts and pbe- 
nomena. We know not tbings in tbeir principle 
and cause, bave no knowledge of tbe relation of 
cause and effect, and know tbings only under 
tbe relations of coexistence and succession. 
Hence science is only tbe statement, description, 
and classification of facts or pbenomena, and bis 
biology, or science of life, recognizes no principle 
of life, but attempts to sbow bow tbe vital pbe- 
nomena are evolved from tbe mecbanical, cbem- 
ical, and electric cbanges or arrangements and 
combinations of material atoms, tbe old atomic 
tbeory of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicnrus, 



108 FAITH AXD 5CIEXCE. 

SO charmingiy clianted by tlie poet LucretiiLS. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer, no doubt, in this muti- 
lates tlie intelligible world, and excludes from 
the category of the knowable mtich that is with- 
in the province of reason, which the impure ra- 
tionalists assert, and rightfully assert, for they 
admit supernatural revelation as a means of 
knowing, though not as a ground of faith in 
anything stiprarational. But the pure rational- 
ist, as will be explained ftirther on, can go no 
further than Mr. Herbert Spencer, since we do 
and can know only what is sensibly represented 
to the understanding, and therefore by the nat- 
ural understanding alone only sensible facts or 
phenomena, or what falls under the obserratioii 
of the senses. And this is precisely the difficulty 
with pure rationalism. In relegating principles 
and causes to the category of the unknowable, it 
renders imjDossible all science even of the intel- 
ligible, and thus mutilates reason itself. The 
statement, description, and classification of 
atomic changes and combinations of matter, 
whether mechanical, chemical, or electric, is a 
very necessary preparation for the construction 
of the physical sciences, but is not itself science, 
and with it, unless you know something more, 
you are no wiser than without, for you know the 
reason of nothing, explain nothing, any more 



RATIONALISM. 109 

than you do TV^lien you say two and two, and do 
not add two and two are four. To restrict hu- 
man intelligence to sensible phenomena alone 
is to reduce human intellect below that of the 
lower orders of creatures whose senses are often 
acuter and further reaching than man's. The 
liound and the horse are not msually regarded as 
■capable of science, but they have ordinarily as 
^ood eyes and ears as man. Science is not in ob- 
serving and simply classifying facts, but in 
knowing principles and causes, and in referring 
the facts to their principles and causes, and ar- 
ranging them under the law of their generation 
^nd production. Animals observe and to a cer- 
tain extent classify phenomena as well as man. 
The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his mas- 
ter's crib, the dog confounds not his master with 
a stranger, a white man with a negro, a gentle- 
man with a beggar. To deny that man can 
know principles or facts under any other rela- 
tions than those of coexistence and succession is 
•simply to deny reason itself and degrade human 
science to the level of brute intelligence. 

There are, in fact, men standing high in the 
scientific world, if not at its head, to whom this 
would be no reductio ad absurdum, or anything 
more than they are disposed to believe and are 
collecting and classifying facts to prove. They 



110 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

have placed man in the order of mammalia at 
the head, but in the order of the animals 
amongst which the mother suckles her young, 
and they are laboring to find proofs that there 
is a regular progression from the mineral to the 
plant, from the plant to the animal, and from 
the lowest forms of animality up to man. They 
entertain seriously, perhaps hope to establish 
the hypothesis that man is simply the chimpan- 
zee or gorilla developed or completed, and they 
are already nearly conyinced that the best de- 
veloped of the simian touch the lowest of the 
human family. It is singular how little anything 
but anatomical structure or some incidental pe- 
culiarity which gives no hint of the quality or 
property of the plant or animal is considered by 
naturalists in their classifications. One may 
master the whole Linnean science of botany and 
know nothing more of the qualities or prop- 
erties of a single plant than before, and in the 
classification of man his soul, his reason, his 
moral and intellectual qualities or capacities 
count for nothing. Indeed, men endowed with 
rare intellectual powers, with rare genius even^ 
are hard at work to prove that man is merely an 
animal, not only figuratively, but literally a 
brute, not apparently reflecting that till they 
can find brutes engaged in establishing the game 



RATIONALISM. 111. 

thesis they have very little chance of success^ 
It is very doubtful, to say the least, if even the- 
latter class of animals take any interest in the^ 
problems and laborious investigations so at- 
tractive to the Comtes, the Littres, the Owens^ 
the Huxleys, the Liebigs, the Darwins, the Her- 
bert Spencers, or could comprehend as much of 
their theories as they do themselves. 

But be this as it may, and though our men of 
science both by precept and example have done 
their best to prove science impossible and to ef- 
face all radical distinction between man and the 
brute, and really have proved that rationalism 
left to itself soon ceases to be rational, their la- 
bors have not been in vain, and by their un- 
wearied industry they have amassed abundant 
and invaluable materials for the construction of 
the sciences which the philosopher has hitherto 
lacked. Their inductions, though invalid on 
their own theories, are often just and have led to 
the most useful applications in the mechanical 
and industrial arts, because the human mind 
has a more truly dialectic constitution than they 
recognize. They have explored every corner of 
the globe, they have thrown great light on phys- 
ical geography, enumerated, described, and class- 
ified, very unscientifically often, an immense^ 
variety of four-footed beasts, reptiles, birds and 



.112 .FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

fishes, enlarged our menageries, and enr-iclied 
our jardins de plantes, and given ii^ a cosmos 
far more extensive and comprehensive than that 
of Aristotle or Pliny the Elder. Enongh will re- 
main when their ab^nrd theories and hypotheses 
are exploded and forgotten, and science placed 
in accord with common sense, though man be 
no longer regarded as a developed monkey, to 
command the gratitude of mankind. 

The positivist^, who and from their absurd re- 
ligious pretensions, are the best representatives 
of pure rationalism jimx now to be found, though 
they may have disappeared before these pages 
are read, tell us plainly that we can know only 
sensible facts and phenomena under the rela- 
tions of coexistence and succession, that prin- 
ciples and causecs are for us pure entia rationis, 
mere metaphysical abstractions, and therefore 
sheer nullitie^s, that for us at least there are no 
principles or causes, fii^st or final causes, that all 
thingB are to us simply phenomenal, and that 
truth and science are only phenomenal, relative, 
varying with time and place. Suppose that it is 
so, that they are right, you can never bring man- 
kind to believe it. Men do and will continue to 
believe that there is eternal and unchanging 
tinith, that there are eternal, universal, and im- 
mutable principles, that all things that change 



RATIONALISM. 1.13 

are contingent and have a cause independent of 
themselves, and that facts and phenomena, till 
known in their principles and causes, are not 
really known at all. People do not believe and 
will not believe that fact^ exist without being 
made, or that they can be made without a 
maker; they do not believe nor can be made to 
believe that phenomena can subsist by them- 
selves without anything under them to sustain 
them, or of which they are phenomena ; and till 
they do so believe they will not be contented to 
seek no further. Topsy's answer, I didn't come^ 
I growed, is not generally satisfactory. Do yon 
say Topsy was right, and her answer, instead of 
being taken as a proof of the stupidity of an un- 
instructed negro girl, should be taken as an evi- 
dence of the most advanced philosophy of the 
age? Do you say that men ought not to look 
beyond the phenomenal, that they should con- 
fine their thoughts and desires to the relative,, 
the sensible, the phenomenal world, that is ta 
the symbol without seeking its meaning, what 
do you but fall into the precise fault which the 
rationalists are perpetually bringing against the 
exclusive supernaturalists, that they forbid men 
the free and full exercise of reason? It is as 
necessary to suppress reason to keep people 
within the narrow limits of pure rationalism as 



114 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

witliin the limits of pure supernaturalism. 
What scope is there for reason in a system that 
includes in the category of the knowable only 
sensible facts, or phenomena without their 
noumena? 

The human mind cannot be made to stop with 
the relative, for the relative not existing alone 
or having the principle and cause of its exist- 
ence in itself, is not by itself alone in the cate- 
gory of the knowable. The relative is conceiv- 
able only in relation, and the relation is conceiv- 
able only in the related, or the correlatives. The 
<2onception of a thing as relative connotes the 
<:onception of that which is not relative, but ab- 
solute. Sir William Hamilton has gained much 
credit by maintaining that the human mind can- 
not think the infinite, the absolute, the uncon- 
ditioned, and his philosophy on this point is 
generally accepted by the English-speaking 
world, but if he is right, man cannot think at all, 
for he cannot thing the fijiite, the particular, the 
relative, the conditioned without thinking si- 
multaneously and in one and the same thought 
that which bounds, conditions, and makes the 
relative, as I have abundantly shown. Thus 
pure rationalism leads inevitably, as its ablest 
expounders present it, to nihilism. The mind 
eannot think the unconditioned, says Sir Wi- 



RATIONALISM. 115 

liam, for the very thought that thinks it condi- 
tions it; but it cannot think the conditioned 
without the unconditioned, for without it the 
conditioned is nothing, is not thinkable. 

But without pushing rationalism so far, and 
conceding that we can and do perceive in sensi- 
ble things, not merely the phenomena or phan- 
tasms, but directly the things themselves, still 
it is only the sensible properties of things, not 
the substance or suppositum in which the prop- 
ierties inhere, or of which they are properties, 
that we perceive, for substances are in all cases 
supersensible, and are grasped not by the senses, 
but by the intellect or noetic faculty of the soul. 
They pertain to the intelligible order, not to the 
sensible, as theologians have abundantly proved 
by the ontological and psychological investiga- 
tions which have been provoked by the 
controversies respecting Transubstantiation, 
and Sir William Hamilton himself, the 
great champion of the direct perception 
of things against the peripatetics, who 
maintain that we perceive directly and 
immediately only their phantasms or, as the 
moderns say, their phenomena, does not pretend 
the contrary. All he pretends is that he has 
exploded the theory of representative ideas and 
proved that we perceive directly the external ob- 
IJects themselves. 



116 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

Whether Sir William holds that we grasp the 
substances or not, is not very clear, and if he 
does he holds that it is discursively, as a logical 
induction from the sensible properties, or by a 
principle of the mental constitution, as did Dr. 
Keid, which creates an invincible belief that 
there is a supersensible substance in which the 
sensible properties inhere. That man has a real 
noetic faculty and does through the medium of 
the sensible, or sensible representation, really 
perceive the intelligible or supersensible, is a 
fact that I shall prove further on. If the 
rationalists claim that the reason intuitively or 
discursively attains to the supersensible sub- 
stance in the sense of supporter of the sensible 
properties, their claim will be conceded, for I 
also hold the sensible, while in its order as real 
as the intelligible, to be mimetic or symbolical 
of the supersensible. But even conceding all 
this, which is more than most rationalists will 
accept, still as the substances are intelligible 
and above the senses, so are the essences of 
things above substances, superintelligible and 
not cognizable by reason at all. The sensible 
properties depend on the intelligible substance^ 
and the intelligible substance on the superintel- 
ligible essence. Hence both the sensible and the 
intelligible, the properties and their substance. 



RATIONALISM. 117 

have their origin, their principle, their cause, or 
ground in the siiperintelligible essence, or in. 
what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls the nnknowablej; 
and consequently can be scientifically known 
only in knowing the superintelligible. Hence 
rationalism, even if it rise above the sensible to 
the intelligible, can never be really science, be- 
cause it must always remain ignorant of the 
essence of the intelligible. 

The essence is not unfrequently confounded 
with substance, and by the scholastics is taken to 
mean the whole thing, its substance, nature, and 
properties; but this is not its theological nor its 
popular sense. All the theologians agree that 
the essence of God, or God in his essence, is in 
no sense cognizable by the natural powers of 
any creature, and yet St. Paul assumes that the 
Romans knew God, and he blames them when 
they knew him for not worshipping him as God. 
They, he says, are without excuse, "because from 
the creation of the world, the invisible things of 
him, even his eternal power and divinity, are 
clearly seen, being understood by the things that 
are made.'' It is clear then that the theologians 
must distinguish between knowing that God is 
and is God, and knowing him in his essence, or 
as he is in himself, that is, in his essence. This 
essence is what he is in his being or in himself. 



118 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

Hence St. Jolin says, "it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be, but we know we shall be like 
him because we shall see him as he is," plainly 
implying that though we now know his being 
and attributes we do not know, do not see him 
as he is in himself, that is, in his essence. At 
least, this is the interpretation the theologians 
give. The essence of a thing according to the 
theologians then is, that which is intrinsically, 
in itself, that which makes it what it is, the 
causa essentialis, or that, as Webster defines it, 
which constitutes the peculiar nature, or being, 
or substance, and distinguishes it from every 
other. And this is the popular sense of the 
word, at least in English. It is that which it is 
necessary to know in order to have real science, 
but is that which reason cannot in anything at- 
tain to. The essence of God is suprarational, 
and can be known only through what theolo- 
gians call the ens supernatural e, or glorifica- 
tion; and as the essences of things are intelligi- 
ble only in the essence of God, they too are in all 
cases superintelli^ble. 

Now as we do not know and cannot know by 
natural reason the essences of things, and as all 
in the thing depends on the essence, we come 
back to the previous conclusion that rationalism 
under none of its forms can attain to absolute 



RATIONALISM. 119 

science, and agree with Sir William Hamilton, 
Herbert Spencer, and tlie positivists, that with 
reason alone all our knowledge is relative. Sir 
William Hamilton, as we have seen, denies that 
man can attain to the knowledge of the absolute, 
the non-relative, the unconditioned, and there- 
fore he excludes ontology, or the science of be- 
ing, from the domain of human science, and re- 
stricts philosophy to psychology and logic. But 
since without being there is and can be neither 
logic nor psychology, the real result at which he 
arrives is that philosophy is an illusion, a phan- 
tasmagoria, and that for man there is no real 
science, no knowledge, but universal nescience. 
But here again we encounter a difficulty. 
Pyrrhonism is an impossibility. If it is certain 
that there is no absolute knowledge, or knowl- 
edge of that which is absolute, equally certain is 
it that there can be no absolute or universal 
nescience. No man ever does or can arrive at 
the pleasant state described by Byron, in which 
one not only doubts of all things, but even 
doubts if doubt be doubting. To doubt is an in- 
tellectual act, no less than to believe. He who 
doubts knows that he doubts, and therefore 
knows something. He who doubts, by the very 
act of doubting, asserts the truthfulness of the 
reason by which he doubts, and therefore that 



120 FAITH AXD SCIEXCE. 

slie is a true, not a false or cleceptive ligM, and 
therefore is as true Tvlien and wliere she affirms 
as when and where she donbts. Men neither do 
nor can distrnst either their reason or their 
senses, and consequentlr men are never practi- 
callv sceptics, and, however they in their specu- 
lations tend to universal scepticism, they are 
istill firm believers in the real existence of them- 
selves, of the nniverse, and of other men. 

In showing that reason cannot recognize her 
ovm limitations except in the intnition of the 
snprarational which limits it, which intuition is 
impossible to reason — because she can take cog- 
nizance only of that which is positive, which 
really exists, in fact only of being, and limita- 
tion is negative, is neither existence nor being,, 
but their absence, no being, and can be cogni- 
zable by reason only in the intuition of existence 
or being which is unlimited and imposes on- 
reason her limits, — the principle is established 
that negatives are in themselves unintelligible^ 
or inconceivable, and are intelligible only in the 
being affirmed. It is impossible to frame a form 
of words that expresses universal negation. In 
the assertion, there is nothing, or nothing is, the 
assertion is made by the assertion of being, ex- 
pressed by is, the verb to be. I cannot deny my 
own existence, because in denving I affirm the 



RATIONALISM. 121 

denier. While then rationalism tends to nihil- 
ism or nescience, it is impossible to carry man- 
kind with it, as they are constantly brought 
back instinctirely and logically to the assertion 
of 'being and science. This is the objection to it, 
that it is either too much or too little for itself. 
No man can follow it in its tendency either to 
science or to nescience, without falling into gross 
sophisms ; or, in other words, rationalism is illog- 
ical, cannot answer the dialectic demands of the 
understanding, and therefore is not a complete 
and harmonious whole capable of sufficing for 
itself. 

The reason of this is plain enough. Eational- 
ism is far less than nature, and nature herself 
does not and cannot suffice for herself, because 
she has not in herself, or is not herself, her own 
origin and end, has not in herself her own being, 
which is necessarily in her creator, for, as says 
St. Paul, "in him we liye, and move, and have 
our being," which is as true of the whole of na- 
ture as of any part of nature. Kationalism 
starts with the assumption that nature suffices 
for herself and is explicable mthout reference 
to the Creator, who is supernatural, and it ar- 
rives at nothing, simply because nature without 
the Creator is nothing. Hence necessarily nihil- 
ism. But notwithstanding nature is not noth- 



122 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

ing, but a real existence, cognizable by reason, 
and hence the possibility and reality of rational 
science, but only in the conditions on which na- 
ture herself exists. 

The difficulty grows out of the insane attempt 
to found purely rationalist science, or a science 
based on pure reason, which Reid, Kant, Sir 
William Hamilton, and the experience of phil- 
osophers for oyer two centuries have demon- 
strated to be impracticable. It is not necessary, 
nor proper to make philosophy the ancilla or the 
handmaid of theology, as did the scholastics, 
which was to mistake both the nature and the 
office of reason; nor Avill it do to attempt to 
found science on faith, or principles which are 
certain only by supernatural revelation, as do 
the so-called traditionalists, which were to deny 
both reason and revelation: but philosophy 
should never be detached from theology, though 
distinguished from it, and erected into a sepa- 
rate and independent science. An independent 
science, complete in itself, we have seen it is not 
and cannot be. It was not detached from theol- 
ogy with either the ancient Jews or the ancient 
gentiles, except by the atomists or hylozoists. 
It constituted the rational element of theology, 
as it did in fact with the fathers and the mediae- 
val doctors, as Cousin, than who, on such a 



RATIONALISM. 123 

point, no better authority can be desired, main- 
tains, tbough be tbinks it a great wrong to pbi- 
losopby. 

Tbere is an apparent exception to tbis remark 
witb Obristian fatbers, but no real exception; 
because what tbey distinguisb under tbe name 
of pbilosopby from tbeology founded on faitb is 
not reason or tbe rational element of theological 
science, but tbe Greek, or gentile, wisdom, or 
science. Tbere was a distinction always recog- 
nized between science and revelation, reason 
and faitb; but no separation was recognized till 
after tbe reyival of Greek letters in tbe fifteenth 
century, or fuWy effected before the seventeenth 
century, which may be regarded as the point 
where reason became detached from faith, to the 
great detriment of both. The man who com- 
pleted the separation and attempted the impos- 
sible task of erecting philosophy into a complete 
and independent science was the Bas-Breton 
Rene Descartes. Scotus Erigena dreamt of it in 
the ninth century, Abelard, also a Celt, at- 
tempted it in the twelfth century, Pomponazzi 
and others timidly asserted it in the fifteenth, 
and Telesio and Campanella in the sixteenth, 
but it was completed by Descartes in the seven- 
teenth century. 

Descartes starts with the assumption that 



124 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

pMlosopliy as purely rational science is possible 
and practicable. He erases from liis mind all 
■previous instructionis, beliefs, or conyictions, 
cuts himself, or attempts to cut Mmself, loose 
from antiquity and tradition, and places him- 
self in the position of a man who doubts of every 
thing, and will believe nothing, not even his own 
existence, till it is proved to him after the man- 
ner of the geometricians. It matters not to us 
whether his methodical doubt was real or 
feigned, or provisorily assumed; for if he had 
ever really doubted he could never have got over 
his doubt by the sad dialectics of his system. 
He gets, or professes to get out of his doubt by 
his famous enthymem, Cogito, ergo sum; I 
think, therefore, I exist. He concludes his 
own existence from the fact that he thinks, 
the existence of God from his own, and the uni- 
verse from God. This is the process^ prescribed 
by his method, and every step in it is illogical, 
and indefensible. The existence of the universe 
can be concluded by way of logical deduction 
from the existence of God only on condition that 
creation is a necessary, not a free act, and there- 
fore that the universe is a mode, manifestation, 
emanation, or evolution of God, which is pure 
pantheism, the greatest of all sophisms. Bene- 
dict Spinoza, the apostate Jew of Amsterdam, 



RATIONALISM. 125; 

was the most faithful and the greatest disciple 
Descartes has yet had. 

The existence of God, again, cannot be logical- 
ly deduced from our own personal existence. 
Deduction is simply analysis, and can give only 
the contents of the subject analyzed. To be able 
to say, I exist, therefore God is, would require 
me to be God, or to contain God as one of my es- 
sential attributes, or properties. Finally, the 
enthymem, I think, therefore I exist, is a mani- 
fest paralogism, as more than one of his contem- 
poraries pointed out to him, for ^^I exist'' is al- 
ready asserted in "I think.'' 

Hard pressed by his contemporaries, Des- 
cartes, in one of his letters, abandons his Cogito, 
ergo sum, and says that he never meant it as an 
argument, but as a simple statement of a fact in 
which he finds, or becomes conscious of, his ex- 
istence. Undeniably, an afterthought; but let 
that pass. He then takes the fact of his exist- 
ence from his consciousness, which is only an 
interior or subjective sentiment or affection, 
from which nothing is logically deducible, no 
substantive existence or persisting subject, far 
less God or the exterior universe. Hence he gave 
birth to pure subjectivism, or, as it has been 
called, by a strange misuse of terms, idealism, 
-first in the denial of the externity of the uni- 



126 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

verse with Berkeley and Collier, and also to tlie 
pure sensism of the Abbe Oondillac, and Jeffer- 
son's friend, Destntt de Tracy, who held that the 
sonl, the sentient subject itself, what we call 
me, myself, is only sensation transformed, what- 
ever that may mean — a conclusion not a little 
favored by the fact that Descartes regarded the 
sonl, not as thinking subject, but as thought, 
la pensee, and Leroux, when in his "L'humanite" 
he denies to the individual man all substantive 
existence as an individual and deflneis him to 
be sensation — sentiment — connaissance, only 
preserves and follows the teaching of Descartes, 
who evidently supposed thought without a 
thinker. There is scarcely an error or an ab- 
surdity in all modern philosophy, not one, so 
far as my reading goes, the germ of which is not 
contained in the teaching of Descartes, who 
never had the first spark of the ingegno filos- 
ofico, and scarcely the first rudiments of philos- 
ophical erudition. The Abbe Condillac developed 
Descartes faithfully in one direction, as Spinoza 
did in another. Malebranche, Bossuet and Fen- 
elon, commonly counted Cartesians, may have 
borrowed from him a few phrases, or a few 
forms, but they are theologians, and never ac- 
cepted his systematic views ; they belonged to a 
better school, followed purer traditions, and 



RATIONALISM. 127^ 

were, any one of them, incomparably his supe- 
rior as philosophers. 

Descartes himself became aware that God 
cannot be condnded by way of deduction from 
our own personal existence, and then maintain- 
ed that God is known to be from the idea of God 
innate in the soul; but by idea he does not mean 
God himself who affirms himself as ens, or be- 
ing, to the mind, but he takes idea in a repre- 
sentative sense, as the image or species stamped 
on the soul as the impression of a seal on wax, 
in which sense, notwithstanding Plato's doc- 
trine of ideas, there is no evidence for supposing 
that there are any such things as innate 
ideas, and if the idea of God were so 
impressed or engraven on the soul, it would 
not at all help us toi the knowledge of 
the fact, for it would leave us without 
any means of ascertaining whether there is 
anything really existing to correspond to the 
idea in the mind or soul. To this grave difficulty, 
the pons asinorum of all philosophers who as- 
sert representative ideas, Descartes has no other 
answer than to allege the veracity of God, when 
the question is whether there be a God or not! 
He forgot his method is to doubt of everything 
till proved by rational deduction, and therefore 
must prove by his method that God is before he 



128 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

can adduce liis yeracitv. To saj that we know 
God hj an innate idea representative of Mm, 
and then allege his veracity to prove that the 
idea does represent him, is not a very- conclu- 
sive, if sometimes a very convenient, way of rea- 
soning. There is no question that Descartes be- 
lieved much, or that he embodied in his various 
works much truth, because he w^as a man and 
received Christian instruction, and had not, as 
much as he may have labored to do it, cut him- 
self loose from tradition; but what of truth he 
held he arrived at by another process than the 
method he prescribes, and to which he could 
never have attained if he had been left to his 
own method. 

If Descartes corrupted philosophy by seeking 
to erect itHairto a separate and independent sci- 
ence, complete in the natural order, Hume, in 
the first half of the eighteenth century, went 
far towards proving that the empirical philoso- 
phy attempted in England by Bacon, Hobbes, 
and Locke, is without the slightest scientific 
value, and what he failed to do, Kant has since 
completed. Hume proves as clearly as anything 
of the sort can be proved that we have and can 
have no experience of the relation of cause and 
effect — no experience of cause, particular or 
general, contingent or necessary, or that things 



RATIONALISM. 129 

are connected by any other relation than that 
of time and place; but, he adds, that though no 
other relation is provable from experience, yet 
no man doets or can believe that there is no other 
relation between them. Eeid, the founder of the 
Scottish school, who has rendered an important 
service by exploding the old doctrine of repre- 
sentative ideas and asserting the direct percep- 
tion of things themselves, or, at least, their sen- 
sible properties, made a great show of refuting 
Hume, but really does not differ from him. He 
merely insists more earnestly on the inability 
to disbelieve in the reality of power, cause, cau- 
sation, and asserts that it proceeds from a prin- 
ciple of common sense, or a constituent princi- 
ple of human nature, and is one of the first prin- 
ciples of reasoning which must be taken with- 
out proof, assumed, as self-evident. That is, he 
simply generalized the fact conceded by Hume,, 
and erected it into a principle, but never gave 
it any scientific explanation or demonstrated 
its scientific validity. 

But Immanuel Kant, a man by nature kindred 
to the Greek Aristotle, and the greatest philos- 
opher Germany has given birth to, with the ex- 
ception of Leibnitz, if, indeed, Leibnitz be an 
exception, has settled the question, as a ques- 
tion of pure reason, in favor of Hume, although 



130 FAITH AND SCIEXCE. 

it lias been pretended "by some able men, who 
more admired the transcendental philosophy 
than they understood it, that Kant's purpose 
was to refute Hume's scepticism, and that he 
succeeded in doing it. But euch is in neither re- 
spect the fact. He simply took occasion from the 
publication of the ''Treatise on Human Xature," 
or, as finally modified, ^^ssays on the Human 
UnderstandingV to examine anew, thoroughly 
and impartially, the whole question, and, as far 
as possible, determine what we can and cannot 
do by reason, whether empirical or a priori. The 
result he gives in his ^'Kritik der R^inen Ter- 
nunft,'' and which, as he himself sums it in his 
Preface, is "to demolish reason to make way 
for faith,'' the very ret*ult that Descartes had 
l)efore him arrived at, T\ithout perceiving it, 
when he based all his proofs on the veracity of 
God, without having as yet proved in any man- 
ner that God is, and also the very result at which 
his greatest disciple, Sir William Hamilton, ar- 
rives, which is ably set forth in the '^Limits of 
E^ligious Thought," by Sir William^s disciple, 
Henry Longiieville Mansel, which should have 
l3een entitled "Limits of Reason." It is, in fine, 
the result, so far as reason detached from revela- 
tion goes, at which arrived the distinguished 
Cardinal Newman, as is evident from his ^^Apol- 



RATIONALISM. 131 

ogia pro Vita Sua," and at which had prior to 
him arrived Pascal, Huet, Bishop d'Avranches, 
and Viscount de Bonald, founder of the French 
school of traditionalists. 

None of these great men are to be classed as 
practical sceptics, or to be regarded as holding 
that the human race can attain to nothing af- 
firmative. Pascal, Huet, De Bonald, and Newman 
fall back on revelation and bring in faith to sup- 
ply the defect of reason ; Reid fell back on what 
he calls the principles of common sense, or con- 
stituent principles of the human understanding; 
Kant fell back on what he calls the practical 
reason, very nearly the common sense of Reid; 
and Father Buffier, that is, as we explain it, on 
reason, taken not as pure speculative reason, 
but taken in sensu composito, as actually formed 
by revelation or tradition and cultivation. New- 
man evidently gets over the difficulty, not by 
reason alone, nor by revelation alone, but by 
their combined or blended light, as the Holy See 
has somewhere defined, mutually assisting each 
other. Hamilton and Mansel, as far as they af- 
firm at all, appear to do it on faith, which has 
with them no rational motive. 

Whether any of these ways is to be accepted, 
or whether there is any possible way of solving 
the difficulty, or not, this much is certain, name- 



132 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

ly, pure rationalism is impracticable and self- 
contradictory. It proceeds on the assumption! 
that nature is complete in herself, and is expli- 
cable without referring to anything above or 
beyond henself, which, not being the fact, the 
science founded on it must be incomplete and 
baseless. Nature is not a complete, independ- 
ent and self-sufficing order. It is not a self -ex- 
istent order, as is evident from its very depend- 
ence and incompleteness, and has and must 
have its principle and cause, its origin and end,, 
in that which transcends it and is strictly su- 
pernatural. The natural begins and ends in the 
supernatural, without which it does not and 
cannot exist. Sever it from the supernatural 
and it would be simply nothing, a pure nullity. 
Eeason, then, even if commensurate with na- 
ture, could not alone give us a science of nature,, 
because nature alone is inexplicable, as has beea 
amply proved by the sad failures of your natural 
philosophers who undertake to explain it, or 
the least of its phenomena, without a First and 
a Final Cause. A complete, self-consistent and 
self-coherent rationalist science, founded on nat- 
ural reason alone, is simply impossible. 

This conclusion is confirmed by the experience 
of all ages and nations. The rationalist has al- 
ways had all of reason, and all of nature, and if 



RATIONALISM 133 

he is right in rejecting the supernatural, he has 
had no obstacles to oyercome bnt such a»s are in- 
herent in reason and nature themselves, and 
when and where has he been able to construct 
a rationalistic system that would hang together, 
or with which reason herself is or can be satis- 
fied? All exclusiye rationalism in all ages and 
nations has proved an intellectual failure, and 
no people are more thoroughly persuaded of it 
than rationalists themselves, who are noted for 
their ridicule of one another, and for the ease 
with which they explode one another^s systems. 
The greatest philosophical geniuses that have 
ever lived have failed equally with the smallest, 
and there is something sad in the tone with 
which Theodore Jouffroy says the poor plough- 
boy who has learned his Christian Catechism 
has solved for him the problems which the phi- 
losophers seek in vain to solve. The common 
sense of mankind is far more scientific and con- 
tains far more truth than the theories of the 
greatest philosophers, and Cousin very justly 
maintains that all that philosophy can do is to 
explain and verify common sense, or the com- 
mon beliefs of mankind, always, and every- 
where, and by all. Mankind do not believe, and 
have never believed, in purely rationalistic sci- 
ence; but they believe, and always and every- 



134 Fx\ITH AND SCIENCE. 

where haye belieyed, that true philosophy, true 
science, real knowledge, what the Grreeks called 
sophia, is the joint product of reason and revela- 
tion. 



OHAPTEE V 



REVELATION. 



Every author, somebody has said, whatever 
else he may write, always writes himself. Every 
man enters into his thought and act as one of 
its elements, and enters in spite of himself as he 
is. No one, however skilful an actor he may 
be, can wholly divest himself of himself, and 
think and act as another. Even in his imitations 
of others something of himself appears, and 
every one will have his own manner of imitation. 
It is impossible for the human mind to make a 
complete abstraction from what it has assimi- 
lated from tradition, and throw itself back into 
the state in which it might have been if we could 
suppose it without any tradition at all; that is, 
in a state of pure reason, inheriting nothing 
from the ages, and receiving no instruction 
from without. The human race has never ex- 



REVELATION. 135 

isted in tliat state. It lias always had, or be- 
lieved that it had, a revelation of some sort, and 
been always engaged with ideas, principles, be- 
liefs, which all the philosophers say are not ob- 
tainable from pure reason; and these ideas, prin- 
ciples, beliefs, are the constituent elements of 
what is called common sense, the common sense 
of mankind. 

Of course, there always has been, and always 
must be, the part of reason in all philosophy, 
as in all theology, and in that part reason is in 
no sense a false or illusory light; but with the 
rational part or element there has always been 
another element, without which the rational 
element would be inoperative, and there would 
and could be no theology and no philoso- 
phy, no science of any kind, properly so called. 
Certain is it that the understanding has been 
developed and won its most brilliant victories 
even within the domain of reason herself in view 
of ideas, principles, and beliefs not obtained 
from reason; either in efforts to disprove, or to 
explain and verify them. The great philosophers 
in all ages have been theologians, and the ra- 
tionalistic philosophy of the day would be a far 
more meagre thing than it is, but for the light 
thrown on the real world and on the human un- 
derstanding bv the discussions and investiga- 



136 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

tioiiis provoked by the great mysteries of faitli. 
Indeed philosophy owes its entire existence to 
men's belief in the unseen and the eternal and 
to their efforts to understand and adjust their 
relations with the supernatural. It lives and 
flourishes only with faith, and droops and dies 
as faith declines and disappears. 

The great fact, however, on which I here in- 
sist, is that practical understanding is not and 
never has been formed by pure reason alone ; or^ 
in other words, reason never operates, never has 
operated, alone. It does not operate so even in 
pure rationalists themselves, and there are ele= 
ments operative in their life, or in their minds^ 
not derived from reason, and which are apparent- 
ly in contradiction with it; certainly elements 
which they do not and cannot reconcile with it, 
as I have shown in the foregoing pages. The 
positivists, than who none have succeeded bet- 
ter in eliminating from their minds everything^ 
derived from revelation, nevertheless bear un- 
mistakable traces of having been brought up in 
the bosom of Christian civilization, and many 
of the arguments they use against Christians are 
drawn from Christian sources. The Cartesian 
method excludes all revelation, all tradition, and 
doubts of everything, at least provisorily, but 
the Cartesian philosophy, as constructed by Des- 



REVELATION. 



137 



cartes, is composed of fragments of Christian 
theology, poorly explained, badly joined to- 
gether, and worse proved. Kant's "Kritik'' ex- 
cludes all science and all tradition, retaining 
nothing but the subject and its forms, modes, 
or affections, but the moral and political doc- 
trines which he founds on what he calls the 
practical reason borrow largely from Christian 
morality. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, never pre- 
tend to build with the individual reason alone, 
l3ut use freely the materials supplied by tradi- 
tion, and the defects of their philosophy are all 
lowing to the fact that they had not tradition in 
its purity and integrity. They took never the ab- 
stract reason, but reason in the composite sense, 
as including tradition as well as rational intui- 
tions. We find in Greece, Rome and several other 
nations , as we find in modern nations, men who 
rejected not only the fables of the gods, but sad- 
ly mistook the nature and attributes of the Di- 
vinity, and attempted to explain nature without 
transcending nature; yet these by their contro- 
versies and denials, bear witness to the fact that 
the great body of the people had a traditionary 
Ibelief in divine revelation, that Cod, or the gods, 
had made known the divine will to men, and 
that they themselves had been reared in that be- 
lief. All the lettered nations of the ancient 



138 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

world had their sacred books, and the unlettered 
had their traditions orally preserved by the 
heads of families, and transmitted from father 
to son, under the guardianship of the priests or 
great sacerdotal corporations. Xo nation or 
tribe has ever yet been found so ignorant, or so 
enlightened, as to have no religious conception, 
no belief in supernatural powers, and no form of 
worship or communion with the supernaturaL 
This has been used as an argument to prove that 
religion is natural to man, and it does prove that 
mankind have always thought and acted under 
the belief, that they had in some form a super- 
natural revelation. 

In this respect there is no difference between 
Jews or Christians and the gentiles. All alike 
believe in the fact of divine revelation, that man 
has never been left to the light of nature alone, 
and that his reason has always acted in combi- 
nation with divine revelation, or what was held 
to be such. Both Jews and Christians hold that 
God has made a revelation of his will super- 
naturally to our first parents in the garden,, 
which has been handed down to us in a broken,, 
mutilated, or travestied form through the gen- 
tiles or nations that apostatized, and an unbrok- 
en form, and in its purity and integrity through 
the patriarchs and the synagogue and, the Chris- 



REVELATION. 139 

tian adds, through the church. The Christian 
fathers and doctors never teach that the human 
race was left without revelation till the advent 
of our Lord, or even till Abraham, but that rev- 
elation was made in the beginning. St. Au- 
gustine speaks for them all when he says, times 
vary, but faith does not vary: as believed the 
patriarchs (patres) so believe we; only they be- 
lieved Christ was to come, and we, that he has 
come. St. Thomas,, an authority not second to 
St. Augustine, maintains that there never has 
been but one revelation, and that was made, at 
least in substance, to Adam in the garden, to 
the progenitor of the race, whose duty it was to 
transmit it unimpaired to his posterity. The 
Holy Scriptures tell us, "there is a spirit in man, 
and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him 
understanding," and speaking of our first par- 
ents, representatives of the race, that God "filled 
them with the knowledge of understanding; he 
created in them the science of the spirit, he 
filled their hearts with wisdom, and showed 
them both good and evil. Moreover, he gave 
them instructions, and the law of life for an 
inheritance." All this implies a primitive rev- 
elation, divine instructions to our first parents 
as to what they must believe, and which they 
were to transmit as an inheritance to their pos- 
terity. 



140 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

This is not adduced, I hasten to say, to prove 
the fact of divine revelation, or that any super- 
natural revelation has ever actually been made; 
but to prove the fact that the tradition, oral or 
written, of a divine revelation is universal and 
unbroken, and therefore that the human under- 
standing has always existed and acted in com- 
bination with a real or supposed revelation, and 
it never has acted or can act otherwise. The 
Athenians erected an altar to the "Unkno^ni 
Grod!" Cicero prayed to the Great Unknown, 
and the French atheist, Volney, in a storm on 
Lake Erie, and a storm on Lake Erie, before 
steamers were used on it, was no child's play, 
prayed to God as a Christian to save him. So 
the poor mother who had or supposed she had 
no faith, watching her dying boy, raised her 
hands, and with agony in her heart and eyes, 
exclaimed: "O, thou Unknown, save my child." 
These and thousands of similar instances prove 
that, be the revelation true or be it false, the 
human understanding has assimilated its gTeat 
principles, and that to deny it we are obliged 
to do violence to ourselves, rend, as it were, our 
own heart and soul, as every one who has fallen 
into unbelief knows but too well from his own 
experience. Few bitterer things are ever felt 
than the less of our childhood's faith, and we 



REVELATION. 141 

almost curse in our angnish the intelligence that 
has destroyed it. It has taken from ns the best 
part of ourselves, and if it has relieved us from 
the terrors of the Stygian waves and the gloomy 
Tartarus, it has dispeopled Heaven and made 
^arth a desert, and placed u« on a mere point in 
space, surrounded by a universal blank. Fill 
up the blank, be it with devils and goblins 
damned; they are something, and anything is 
l)etter than nothing. 

The Holy See, in its rescript against the 
French traditionalists, asserts that the exist- 
ence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and 
human freedom can be proved with certainty 
prior to, or independently of, faith. This, in the 
sense intended by the Holy See, must be ac- 
cepted by every Catholic. The traditionalists 
maintained, or were supposed to maintain, that 
faith precedes science, and that reason in its 
operations must support itself in all matters 
transcending the senses on revelation as its 
basis. That is, they founded science on faith, 
and faith on the veracity of Grod, without any 
rational certainty that God is, or that there is 
any God. Till we know that God is we cannot 
assert his veracity, and therefore must know 
that he is and that he is God and infinitely true, 
before we can believe in his word. The doctrine 



142 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

of the traditionalists would therefore destroy 
both faith and reason, and leave ns only the 
intelligence we have in common with many 
classes of animals. But the condemnation does 
not require us to maintain that man did not 
first learn the existence of God, the immaterial- 
ity of the soul, and human freedom from revela- 
tion, or the instructions which God gave him 
for an inheritance when he placed him in the 
garden; but that these great truths, though 
not discoverable by uninstructed reason, can yet 
be proved with certainty by reason, without the 
principles or premises which are certain only by 
faith. St. Thomas, as we have seen, who holds 
that the law of nature is rationally certain, as- 
serts that it has been revealed and that without 
its revelation the bulk of mankind could not be- 
come acquainted with its precepts. Yet St. 
Thomas holds the law of nature to be a dictamen 
of reason, and therefore could not have made 
it depend on faith or revelation for its scientific 
basis. 

Science certainly does not depend in the order 
intelligible to us on revelation or faith as its 
ground or principle of certainty, which is what 
and all that the rescript of the Holy See cen- 
sures in the traditionalists, and yet revelation, 
not faithj may be neces^sary as a means or con- 



REVELATION. 143 

dition of science even of tlie intelligible. The 
intelligible as the ideal is undoubtedly presented 
to the mind in immediate intuition. This is the 
common doctrine of all those whom the world 
honors as its great philosophers, and were it 
not so, there couid be no science, no reasonings 
no demonstration, for all demonstration consists 
in showing that the proposition demonstrated 
has its ground, or is founded in the principles 
intuitively given. The human mind can neither 
operate nor exist without intelligible principles. 
It cannot therefore either find or make its prin- 
ciples, for nothing can act before it exists, or 
without the principles of its existence and activ- 
ity. The intelligible principles must be given 
immediately by the Creator in creating the mind 
and rendering it capable of mental operations. 
The principles are intelligible, and therefore 
cannot, as the sensists dream, be obtained by the 
mind from sensation, for, till it has them, it does 
not exist, is no mind at all. But these prin- 
ciples constitute, I may say create, the mind, its 
very faculty of knowing, and we call knowledge 
only that which the mind knows by the exercise 
of its faculty of knowing. The intuition is not 
knowledge in this sense, but the principle of 
knowledge and basis of all rational certainty. 
But St. Thomas holds that the existence of 



.144 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

God is not self-evident to iis. To the question, 
Utrum Deum esse sit per se notuni, he answers, 
non quoad nos. The pretense that we have in- 
tuition of God, or know him intuitively, set up 
by come philosophers, is sustained by no great 
philosopher, ancient or modern. That that 
which is God is intuitively affirmed to us, is 
maintained by St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Male- 
branche, Fenelon, Gerdil, Gioberti, and others; 
but none of them pretend that we know intu- 
itively that what is so affirmed is God. What 
is intuitivel}^ affirmed is the ideal, which is God 
as the intelligible, or in face of our intelligence; 
but we know that the ideal is God not intui- 
tively, but by reflection, by discursion, or rea- 
soning. On this point there is no difference be- 
tween St. Thomas and Gioberti, for they both 
hold that the intuitive ens is known to be God 
only by demonstration. 

Conceding or maintaining that the intelligible 
as idea, or the ideal, or what some philosophers 
call absolute ideas or necessary ideas, and the 
peripatetics call the first principles of knowl- 
edge, are given intuitively, the difficulty with the 
pure rationalists lies in the fact that the reflect- 
ive reason, the proper human reason, cannot 
take these principles, ideas, intuitively pre- 
sented, immediately from intuition and convert 



REVELATION. 145 

them into human science. We are not pure in- 
telliger^ces and are incapable of pure intellec- 
tions, and can, as oT'^ own proper act, know the 
intelligible, idea, or supersensible, that is, the 
spiritual, only as sensibly represented. This is 
the meaning of the peripatetic maxim, Nihil e^t 
in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu^ 
nothing can be in the intellect which was not 
previously in the senses. It does not mean with 
Aristotle and St. Thomas that we cannot know 
intelligibles or non-sensibles, but that we cart 
know them only as sensibly represented. Man 
acts as he is, he is not pure spirit, but spirit 
united to body, and hence he cannot in this life 
act, think, or know either as pure spirit or pure 
body, or pure matter. This fact is forgotten by 
the pure sensists on the one hand and by the 
pure idealists on the other. We can perform 
purely intellectual or noetic acts, behold imme- 
diately the spiritual, and have intuitive vision 
of God only when our bodies are raised spiritual 
bodies and transformed into the likeness of our 
Lord's glorious body. Hence we can in our 
present state of existence see the spiritual only 
through a glass darkly, per speculum in aenig- 
mate, as says St. Paul, which is as true in the 
intelligible as in the superintelligible order. 
The Abbe Condillac seized upon the fact that 



146 FAITH AXD SCIENCE. 

ive can knoTr only throngh. tlie niedinm of sen- 
sible representation and came to the conclusion 
that T^'e can know only sensibles, and then all 
thought or knowledge is a sensation, and then 
^finally that the sentient subject is only sensa- 
tion transformed, or something sensing itself. 
This extreme sensism has now few eminently 
distinguished advocates, but the greater part of 
those who hare undertaken to refute it, have 
run to the opposite extreme and make the body 
count for nothing in the fact of cognition. The 
ablest, the most erudite, as well as the most bril- 
liant of those who have made war on exclusive 
sensism, is Victor Cousin, and there is not a finer 
piece of philosophical criticism in any civilized 
language than his review of Locke's "Essay on 
the Human Understanding." Yet it errs in the 
:first place by taking Locke as a pure sensist, 
w^hich he is not; for Locke understands the max- 
im, Xihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit 
in sensu, not in the sense that only sensibles axe 
knowable, but in its proper sense, that nothing 
can be known not sensibly represented. He errs 
in the next place by separating in action sensi- 
bility and intellect, and making them act syn- 
cretically instead of synthetically, or dialectic- 
ally, or more simply, he fails to assert the unity 
of the coonitive subject, as also of the cognitive 



REVELATION. 147 

act. In reading him we fail to see the part of 
sensibility in the cognition of intelligibles and 
the part of intellect in sensation or the percep- 
tion of sensibles. Sense and reason are not 
blended so as to act as a single sentient-cog- 
nitive, and a single cognitive-sentient subject. 
Leronx, in his "Kefutation de TEclectisme," es- 
capes this error or defect, and shows very clear- 
ly, as he also does in his "I/Hnmanite," that in 
eyerj act, no matter of what kind or sort, the 
two, or, as he contends, the three psychological 
elements, in his language sensation — sentiment 
— connaissance, enter as the single subject, but 
unhappily he gives these elements of thought 
no subsistence in the individual, no subject, but 
the general man, which is to make the individ- 
ual merely phenomenal, unreal. 

Viscount de Bonald, the profoundest thinker 
in France at the beginning of the present cen- 
tury, less brilliant than his friend, Count de 
Maistre, but endowed with a far superior phil- 
osophic genius, gave the principle of the solu- 
tion in his doctrine that man does not and can- 
not think without language, and that language 
is not a human, but a divine creation. In de- 
veloping this principle he founded the modern 
traditional school, which has incurred the cen- 
sure of the Holy See, but which notwithstand- 



148 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



ing lias brouglit out and established a great 
triitli. M. de Bonald erred in not distinguish- 
ing between intuitive thought and reflectiye 
thought. He does not take note of ideal intu- 
ition which serves as the rational basis or gives 
the principles of all science, and which is the 
creative act of God rather than a proper human 
act, and took thought onlv in the sense that it is- 
our act, that is, reflection. Cousin was one of 
the first — as far as my reading goes, the very 
first, not indeed to distinguish between intu- 
ition and reflection, for that is as old as idMIoso- 
phy, btit the impersonal character of intuition 
and the personal character of reflection; but he 
failed to derive from the distinction all it really 
implies, by making intuition the act of the im- 
personal or spontaneous reason which, save as 
to the mode of its action, he identifies with the 
personal reason, and thus destroys all the scien- 
tific value of the distinction. Cousin never got 
quite clear of the old doctrine of representative 
ideas, and never understood that the ideal is 
God, and not an abstract world, or sort of ter- 
tium quid interposed between God and man, and 
distinct from each, being neither God nor crea- 
ture, and therefore nothing. The same is true 
equally of that profound psychologist, the 
learned and pious Eosmini, who divided the best 



REVELATION. 149 

minds of young Italy with Gioberti. He makesj 
tlie ideal ens, but ens in genere, therefore an ab- 
straction, a mere possible being, but no real be- 
ing, corresponding precisely with das reine Seyn 
of Hegel, which Hegel himself declares is iden- 
tical with das Nichtseyn. The pure being of 
Hegel is simply possible being, and possible be- 
ing is really no being at all. All abstractions,, 
save in the concrete reality, are simply nullitieSj, 
the truth philosophers are slow to recognize. 

But distinguishing between intuitiye thought 
and reflection, and understanding De Bonald to 
mean by thought reflection, what the Italians^, 
in their language so well adapted to the use of 
the philosopher, call ripensare, to think aver or- 
to re-think, his doctrine that we cannot think 
without language is sound and undeniable. In 
purely sensible^ language is not necessary to^ 
thought, because the object is sensibly present* 
I can think a tree when it is before me as well 
without the word tree as with it, but I caanot 
as well recall it or reflect on it when absent. In 
non-sensibles it is different, and I can think 
them only as sensibly represented by language^ 
If I had not the word soul I could never grasp 
the ideal intuition, and it is only through the 
word God that I am able to find what the word 
signifies in what is intuitively presented to me. 



150 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

Throiijgli the medium of language I am first in- 
structed in spiritual truth, and then I find by 
reflection that what I am taught, so far as it is 
within the intelligible order, has already been 
affirmed to me in the ideal intuition. 

Now, language, which may be defined a sen- 
sible sign or representation of the intelligible, 
is not a human invention, but a divine creation. 
Men out of society could not have invented it, 
and society is not possible without language. It 
could not have been the spontaneous growth of 
human nature, for there is more in it than in 
human nature, than in all nature. No doubt 
language adopts its symbolism from external 
nature, or the sensible order, and must do so 
or not be able to be a sensible representation of 
intuitive ideas. But this says nothing against 
its divine origin, for it was only a mind that 
comprehended the whole order of intelligible 
truth that could have constructed a language 
adequate to its representation. 

Whoever studies language, not as a gram- 
marian or philologist, as these terms are now 
understood, but as a philosopher, will find it a 
succession of surprises. There is more and 
deeper and truer philosophy embodied in lan- 
guage than the philosophers have ever mastered, 
and the study of language is the best method 



REVELATION. 151 

possible of studying ideal science, for language 
corresponds to the ideal intuition, and bears in 
its yery structure, its forms, its power of develop- 
ment, expansion, and expression that it pro- 
ceeds from the same universal Mind that 
planned and created the universe. It accords 
with reality, with the truth of things, and lends 
itself with difficulty to the expresision of error 
and falsehood, and never without violence. It 
proves to those who have understanding what 
many people, even revered as philosophers, need 
to be taught, that pure negation is unintelli- 
gible, and that in no language is it posisible to 
express a negative without first making an af- 
firmation. We say such or such a thing is — 
not. The thing is affirmed before it is denied. 
Hence affirmation precedes denial, faith goes be- 
fore doubt, and truth before error and is older 
than falsehood. Hence error is intelligible only 
in the truth denied. The very construction of 
language symbolizes the ideal formula, ens 
creat existentias, being creates existences, 
since no sentence can be formed which does not 
consist of the subject, predicate, and copula, and 
therefore the essential formula of all reality, all 
logic, of all philosophy that is worthy of the 
name. It stubbornly resists both atheism and 
pantheism, and in everv^ sentence it forms ex- 



152 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

presses the trutli that contradicts them. The 
moment a man opens his mouth to utter these 
great sophisms his speech bewrays him, his lan- 
guage becomes confused, incoherent, self-con- 
tradictory, unintelligible, and language is the 
greatest protector of the people against them^ 
for the people left in the simplicity of language 
and common sense are never atheists or panthe- 
ists. Hence the people are always truer in their 
beliefs than philosophers in their speculations. 
Indeed, this is in accordance mth the office of 
language, which is to represent to the reflective 
faculty what is affirmed in ideal intuition. It 
is in some sense a glass which reflects the intui- 
tive affirmations and enables the understanding 
to contemplate them at its ease. But as the in- 
tuitive affirmations are not made by us, are not 
made by the reason, of which they are creative 
and constitutive, it follows necessarily that lan- 
guage which symbolizes or represents them in 
the process of thought cannot be of human ori- 
gin, cannot be our invention or construction, for 
we could not invent or construct it without a 
reflective knowledge of the intuitive affirma- 
tions, and that knowledge is impossible without 
language, and therefore it must be supernatu- 
rally given, as are the intuitions themselves.. 
What we call our reason is natural in the sense 



REVELATION. 153 

that it pertains to that nature with which we 
are created, but it, as every thing created, is 
created by the supernatural. The rationalists 
have proved beyond all cavil that nature has no 
natural origin or cause, and therefore conclude, 
since they will admit nothing supernatural, that 
it has no origin, no cause, at all. The vague im- 
pression that many, who hold that the wor'ld 
was created, have that nature and its creator, 
that is, as its creator, stand in the same order, 
and therefore that the act creative of nature is 
a natural and not a supernatural act, is an er- 
roneous impression. Supernatural is Grod and 
whatever he does directly and immediately by 
himself. Natural is the created order and what 
God does through the medium or agencies of 
its laws or forces as second causes. The cause 
of nature is supernatural, and as the rational 
nature we call man is formed only by reason, 
and reason is constituted only by the affirma- 
tions which I name ideal intuition, it follows 
that the affirmations are super naturally made, 
that is, b}^ the Creator himself, which is neither 
more nor less than saying that our reason is 
supernaturally created. The ideal affirmations 
or intuitions having then a supernatural cause, 
the language which is to symbolize them and to 
re-present them to the reflective faculty, must 



154 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

also liaye a supernatural cause, or be like the in- 
tuitions the direct work of the Creator. 

The essential point is that language was cre- 
ated directly by God himself as necessary to the 
creation and operation of the understanding in 
man. How God created language is not now the 
question. The theologians generally hold that 
God infused language into man along with the 
knowledge with which he created him, or rather, 
that he infused the knowledge in which he in- 
structed the first man under its appropriate sen- 
sible signs or representations. Adam could not 
have been created and left with the naked fac- 
ult}^ of understanding without instruction, for 
without instruction that faculty cannot act or, 
as the rationalists say, be developed; and there 
was no one to instruct him but his Maker. 
Hence the Holy Scriptures teach, in a passage 
from Ecclesiasticus already quoted, that God 
gave our first parents "instructions and the law 
of life for an inheritance.'^ Adam must have 
had infused knowledge then, even of those 
things which his posterity possess by acquisition 
and inheritance, and this knowledge, though in- 
fused, could not be possessed by Adam, and be 
his, or be understood by him without its appro- 
priate sensible representations any more than 
the intuitive afiflrmations themselves. It must 



REVELATION. 155 

have been infused as embodied in language, and 
it may be assumed that the creation of language 
and the infusion of science were simultaneous 
in the one divine creative act that created man 
a living soul, or a living, thinking, speaking 
man, the father, in the order of generation, of 
the human race. 

According to this view, which is that of the 
theologians, language was not created or 
formed, and given to man as empty signs, or 
signs signifying nothing, but the sign and its 
signification, the word and its meaning were 
given together. In exercising his faculties Adam 
found the word and its sense married to each 
other, just as we do now, only he was taught 
directly by God, and we only indirectly, through 
tradition preserved in language and transmitted 
by it from father to son, and teacher to pupil, 
down to us. These direct instructions infused 
into Adam were instructions to the race, because 
the race was in Adam. Adam learned language 
as he learned things, as we learn it as we learn 
things, and used it to express his thought to 
himself or to others, as we do. The necessity 
of language as the condition of thinking or the 
interior word will be shown in another volume 
when treating the mystery of the Trinity and the 
generation of the Word, or second person in the 



156 



FAITH AND SCIENCE-. 



Godhead, should the author live to complete it. 
But there are languages innumerable, and all 
liying languages are continually undergoing 
modifications, losing old locutions and adopting 
new ones, leaving behind old words and taking 
up new words, and using old words in new 
senses. The ordinary Englishman cannot read 
old Gower or Chaucer without a glossary, nor an 
ordinary Frenchman the chronicles of the Sire 
de Joinyille, or even of Sir John Froissart. 
I>ante is read with ease only by learned Italians, 
£ind not always by them without a special prep- 
;aration, and the Niebelungenlied needs to be 
translated to be understood readily by a modern 
German. Are all these different languages, with 
all their yariations and changes, giyen immedi- 
ately by the Creator, and are philologists wholly 
T^^rong in supposing them produced by natural 
laws or causes, formed by derivation one from 
another, by being mixed one with another by 
migration, trade, colonization, conquest, and 
also by the influence of climate, of soil, of moral 
and social habits and conditions? If they are 
not, what was the original language? What 
language did Adam speak? What has become 
of that language? If the various languages and 
dialects now spoken are not divine creations, 
how maintain that language is supernaturally 



given ? 



::revelation. 157 

Tjangiiage may liave been supernaturally 
^iyen, that is, immediately by the Creator in the 
first instance, and yet be subject to natural laws 
in its transmission from father to son. The hu- 
man race was created immediately by the Al- 
might}^, and therefore supernaturally, yet is de- 
veloped, miTltiplled, more or less modified, and 
continued by the operation of natural laws or 
causes, and though all men haye sx)rung by nat- 
ural generation from the same original pair, 
they differ among themselyes no less than do 
the languages they speak. The philologists are 
right in attempting to explain the developments, 
changes, yariations, differences they note in lan- 
guage by natural causes, but they do not succeed 
in finding any langaiage which they regard as 
primitiye, and from which all the others haye 
been naturally derived. All the languages they 
become acquainted with bear evidence in them- 
selves that they are not primitive, but at best 
are only of secondary or tertiary formation. 
Subjected to the natural laws, languages are 
like all things in time and space liable to per- 
petual changes, and hence the necessity, in order 
to maintain the unity and integrity of the idea, 
of some supernatural provision, the divinely as- 
sisted church say the Catholics, a divinely in- 
rspired book say the Protestants, to preserve the 



158 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

unit}' and integrity of language. It was the loss 
of tliis unity and integrity, or confusion of 
tongues at the Tower of Babel, according to Jew- 
ish and Christian tradition, that led to the dis- 
persion of mankind and the great gentile apos- 
tasy. 

But after all it is necessary to distinguish in 
language, as in other things, between the sub- 
stance and its accidental forms and variations. 
Language itself retains its substantial identity 
under all its changes and alterations, as does 
human nature itself, which is the same nature 
in the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the American 
Indian, and in the African negro ; in the Jew, the 
gentile, the Christian and the pagan, the Mo- 
hammedan and the Buddhist, the believer and 
the unbeliever, the just and the unjust. The na- 
ture of a sheep is the same, whether the sheep 
be white or black, and the black sheep may be 
born of white parents. There may be deterio- 
rations in language, as there are in the human 
race, but the elements of all languages are the 
same. All have the noun and the verb, that is 
subject, predicate, and copula, and there are phi-- 
lologists of great respectability that maintain 
that the radicals of all languages are the same. 
This is certainly the case with the Semitic and 
Japetic, and if the connecting link between. 



REVELATION. 159 

these and some of tlie African and the so-called 
Turanian languages is not yet ascertained, that 
is not sajdng that it never existed or does not 
yet exist. Nothing can be concluded from the 
inability of philologists to detect the traces of 
radical identity, for in the changes which have 
gone on during a long series of ages, what is 
called the radical letter may have been lost, as 
we find it frequently has been in words evidently 
derived from others which originally had it, and 
which is retained in the corresponding words in 
cognate dialects. Climate and other physical 
conditions, modes of life, social habits, may have 
so modified pronunciation or so affected the 
physical organs of speech, the muscles, that in 
languages which have no written monuments 
but must be learned from the ear, from the voice, 
no trace of the radical sounds may be discover- 
able even where they really exist. In the Se- 
mitic, especially in the Japetic or Aryan lan- 
guages, the law which governs the changes 
which consonantal sounds undergo is to some 
extent known and determinable, but in the Af- 
rican and American languages it is unknown 
and can hardly be known, since they are not 
written languages. In writing our North Ameri- 
can dialects great blunders are often made, and 
the lexicographers give in an assimilated form 



160 FAITH AXD 5CIEXCE. 

-as single ^ords what are really phrases or sen- 
tences. If then philologists have not sticceeded 
in proving that "the earth was of one tongue 
and of the same speech/*' as the Holy Scrip tnres 
assert, they have proved and can prove nothing 
against it, any more than natnralists have 
against the unity of the hnman race. The great- 
est scientific authorities agTee that science, while 
it is not able from its own light to assert the 
unity of the human race, or the descent by nat- 
ural generation from a single original pair, can 
assert nothing against it. In all such cases, the 
rtile of judgment is to follow tradition. If we 
assume that all men sprtmg from a single pair, 
and therefore the unity of the race, which is un- 
deniably the Christian doctrine, and which noth- 
ing disproves, the original unity of language 
follows as a matter of course, and then the com- 
mon-sense conclusion is that languages have un- 
dergone changes and split into various dialects 
by like changes which the human race itself has 
undergone, and which have divided it into so 
many distinct varieties, families, nations, and 
races, now so far asunder that it seems hardly 
credible that they were originally all of one and 
the same race. 

But be all this as it may, the elements of all 
langiiages, I repeat, are the same. Their logic, 



REVELATION. 161 

and the essential principles of their gTammair 
are the same, and so also is their representatiye 
or symbolic character. All the rest is accidental,, 
and by whatever causes prodliced, affects not 
the assertion of the divine and supernatural ori- 
gin already proved; for that assertion does not 
preclude, and is not intended to preclude, the 
accidental changes, variations, or even corrup- 
tions of language under the influence of natural 
causes, the strongest and most corrupting of 
which is and always has been that of the phi- 
losophers, or rather sophists, so abundant iii 
every age and nation. The people never corrupt 
langTiage; they are faithful to tradition, or at 
least the last to depart from it, and therefore 
are able to express themselves in the language of 
their ancestors ; and one of the most encouraging 
signs of the times is in the fact that ]3hilolo gists 
are turning their attention to the simple and nat- 
ural language of the people in simpler and less 
artificial ages than the present. Percy and those 
who have followed him have in reviving the old 
English ballad poetry rendered great service to- 
the English philologist, and the French are do- 
ing still more for the French philologist in re- 
turning to the French poetical chronicles and 
romances of the twelfth, thirteenth, and four- 
teenth centuries. The sophists having lost the 



162 FAITH AXD SCIEXCE. 

sense of tradition, or ceasing to resj^ect it, are 
perpettiallv concocting new theories wMch liare 
no fotmclation in reality, and which they can 
contrive to exj)ress only by wresting langtiage 
from its j)lain nattiral sense, by the introduction 
of neologisms which are repugnant to its genius, 
and tend only to mar its simx^licity and desj^oil 
it of its dialectic harmony, and hence the more 
spectilatire a people is, and the more generally 
Mticated it is, if not edticated in accordance 
i\i.th tradition, the more does it corrupt its lan- 
guage and iinht it to be the symbol of ideal 
trtith. The earliest stage of a language is that 
which best expresses the tradition of divine rev- 
elation, only we must not take it as we find it 
with savages as in its earliest stage, for the sav- 
age is not the j)rimitive, but the degenerate man. 
The primitive revelation necessary to the hu- 
man understanding is made as embodied in lan- 
guage and is transmitted with more or less pu- 
rity and integrity along with language in all na- 
tions, so that no people who has inherited 
langtiage is wholly destitute of divine revelation 
supernaturally made. This revelation trans- 
mitted from father to son from Adam to us is 
what is called tradition and forms the tradition- 
ary element of the human understanding itself, 
without which there would be intuition indeed, 



REVELATION. 16.3 

but no ijractical under standing. Thus far De 
Bonald and the French traditionalists are evi- 
dently right, and so far the Holj See has not, as 
I understand its rescript, censured them. 

Now as language is not words without mean- 
ing, though many people use it as if such were 
the fact, but signs which are significant, and as 
the understanding cannot seize and appropriate 
the ideal intuition, or intuitive affirmations, 
save as sensibly represented in language, which 
is suiDernaturally given, it follows that there is 
and can be no science without divine and super- 
natural revelation which represents to the mind 
or reflective reason what God affirms or presents 
to it intuitively. But what is sensibly repre- 
sented that lies within the order of our intelli- 
gence is seen, when so represented, to be only 
the reproduction or reaffirmation, or affirmation 
by us, of what God affirms intuitively and in af- 
firming which he creates us rational creatures. 
It therefore cannot be denied without denying 
reason itself, which cannot be done in any pos- 
sible form of words. This as to the principles of 
science settles in advance the question of cer- 
tainty. 

The difference between this doctrine and that 
of the traditionalists on one hand, and the doc- 
trine of the pure rationalists on the other, is 



1^4 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

Tery plain and yery great. It does not deny 
reason or in tlie least distrust it, nor does it in^ 
the order of our intelligence found the conclu- 
sions obtained on the authority of revelation or 
tradition. Such may indeed be the case with the 
simple and unlearned, as St. Thomas implies^ 
when he asserts the necessity for them of the 
reyelation of the precepts of the law of nature, 
but not with the learned, the cultiyated, the 
scientific. With these the ground of assent is 
reason, intuitiye or discursiye, and therefore is- 
the assent of knowledge strictly so called. Nor, 
on the other hand, does it assert the ability of 
reason to construct science without the aid of 
reyelation or tradition embodied in language,, 
eyen in the intelligible order. For that revela- 
tion is necessary, not as a substitute for reason,, 
nor as a ground of certainty, but to represent in 
a tangible form to the reflective understanding 
the spiritual or intelligible object presented by 
God himself as the ideal to reason. 

God affirms himself immediately as the cre- 
ator, object, and light of the intellect, but for 
the intellect to be able on its side to affirm the 
same, God must be sensibly represented in lan- 
guage through the medium of the word God, 
creator, object, light to the refiective under- 
standing. We cannot demonstrate and know 



REVELATION. 165 

that God is unless lie is represented to the mind, 
or unless we are told that he is, any more than 
we can demonstrate the truth or falsity of a 
thesis that we have never heard of, or that has 
never been stated to the understanding, and as 
God can be represented to the mind only by 
revelation or tradition, though living, moving, 
and having our being in him, though really 
asserting in every act, every thought, every 
word, every argument, that which really is God, 
we should yet never know him, or that he is that 
very universal, eternal, necessary, and immuta- 
ble idea which is always intuitively present and 
which is to the understanding as the correlative 
of the contingent, the finite, the mutable, the 
transitory. The light would be the life of men, 
would shine in the darkness, and the darkness 
all in apprehending it, would comprehend or 
know it not. What in Adam was direct revela- 
tion, or divine instruction, is tradition in us, 
and this tradition is not necessary as the ground 
of science, but necessary as one of its indispen- 
sable conditions, so that we say that every act 
of science implies a union or synthesis of revela- 
tion and reason. 

To this it may be very pertinently objected, 
that, if true in the ideal order, it is not true in 
the order of sensible things, for sensible objects 



166 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

need no representation by sensible signs. Sen- 
sible objects present and represent themselTes. 
I can know a rock, a plant, a tree, as well with- 
ont knowing its name as by knowing it. 'No 
doubt of it. But tke knowledge of tlie sensible, 
as I have said in treating of facts and phenom- 
ena, is not properly science, and Plato lias 
shown that science is not in knowing particular 
or sensible things, but in knowing their ideas, 
or as I say, the ideal. It may be that our scien- 
tific men rarely attain to anything more than 
sensible facts, but they aspire to more, and seek 
from the obseryation of sensible particulars to 
induce a law which explains and governs them, 
and laws, that is, causes and principles are in the 
supersensible or intelligible, and are never, and 
Hume and Kant have shown they never can be, 
the object of sensible observation or experience. 
There is in this no distrust of the senses ; in their 
normal state their testimony is unimpeachable, 
and they depose truly as far as they go, and 
hence in the mystery of the Keal Presence or 
Transubstantiation, the report of the senses is 
accepted, for every theologian will maintain that 
all that the senses perceive, or all that is sensible 
in the bread and the wine remains unchanged, 
and only that which is non-sensible is transub- 
stantiated, so that the conclusion drawn from 



REVELATION. 167 

the report of the senses, which is ordinarily 
true, is in this case rendered by a miracle not 
valid. Mankind credit, and cannot be made to 
discredit them. They never have, and never 
ought to have, any respect for a philosophy or a 
theology that requires them to distrust their 
senses, any more than for one that requires 
them to distrust their reason. A doctrine that 
can assert itself only by making war on the hu- 
man faculties and antagonizing the common 
sense of mankind, is by that fact alone convicted 
of error and sophistry. All that is contended 
here is, not that the senses are untrue, or that 
the sensible does not really exist, but that the 
sensible lies below the regions of science proper, 
and intelligence of it alone is only an intelli- 
gence which man shares with most animals, and 
which in no language is called science or knowl- 
edge. 

But in all thus far advanced we have not pro- 
ceeded much if any beyond the limits of the 
second class of rationalists described. Eeve- 
lation or tradition, which must have been re- 
velation to the first man, and which is embodied 
and transmitted with more or less purity and 
inteigrity in language, is shown to be necessary 
to the intellectual process, but not as the ground 
of intellectual assent. All is built by its aid, 



168 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

but nothing is built on it. It is thus far as- 
serted as representatiye, not as authoritatiye, 
and the error of the traditionalists is therefore 
ayoided. Faith has not thus far been demand- 
ed, and therefore no argument to prove the 
yalidity or authority of tradition, which we 
haye used as a means, not as a ground of science. 
If language could be assumed to haye been uni- 
yersally preserved in its unity and integrity, 
and tradition embodied in it to have therefore 
undergone no alteration or corruption, the 
proof we have given of its origin in the direct 
and immediate supernatural revelation to the 
first man would suffice to establish both its 
yalidity and authority even in matters of sci- 
ence. But this cannot be assumed, and except 
in the language of the church, evidently is not 
true, and it is precisely because it is not true, 
because language has been corrupted and no 
longer faithfully represents the affirmations of 
intuition that so many errors in philosophy 
and science obtain. The ideal presented in in- 
tuition is not faithful!}'- reflected in language, 
and therefore it is that the, understanding 
which as St. Thomas says can never be false, is 
led into so many errors. Hence the connection 
of the church even with science as its gniardian 
and protector, for in her and in her alone is Ian- 



REVELATION. 169 

guage, therefore the primitive revelation, or tra- 
dition, preserved in its purity and integrity. Her 
language alone preserves in its purity, and with- 
out diminution or addition, the original 
instructions given by our Creator to our first 
parents, which faithfully represent the ideal 
affirmed in intuition, and therefore we must con- 
sult her language in order to make our science 
conform to reality. 

But still science is not taken on the author- 
ity of the church any more than on the author- 
ity of revelation, and as yet revelation leaves us 
in the order of the intelligible, in which we 
know God intuitively only as the ideal, only as 
he, so to speak, faces our intelligence or faculty 
of intelligence, not as he is in his essence, or as 
he is in himself. I have presented reality as the 
sensible, the intelligible, and the superintelli- 
gible, which is the essence. The sensible and the 
intelligible have their origin and ground in the 
essence, which is isuperintelligible and is there- 
fore to the human intel'lect impenetrable mys- 
tery. It must be known to render our science 
of the sensible and the intelligible complete, 
and perfectly satisfactory. But that cannot be 
in this life, or in the other by natural means 
precisely because it is naturally superintelli- 
gible. It cannot be revealed so as to become 



170 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

science, and is a mystery to the understanding 
after reyelation as before, and is apprehended 
only by faith. Now, what is the relation of 
faith to reason, and where and how does faith 
supplement reason, advance, confirm, or in any 
way affect science? This is the question to be 
considered'in the next chapter. 



CHAPTER A^I. 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



In the fifth chapter we have considered rev- 
elation not as an object of faith, but as a means 
or instrument of science, and have said no more 
than might be accepted by rationalists of the 
isecond class described in the outset. But the 
second point made against rationalism of every 
form is that the science which is restricted to the 
intelligible is incomplete and unsatisfactory to 
reason herself, because it does not attain to the 
superintelligible in which the intelligible has its 
root. 

Complete or perfect science which attains to 
things in their causes and to causes in their 
essence is not attainable in this life either with 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 171 

or without reyelation. The revealed mysteries 
are mysterieiS still, and are objects of faith, not 
of science properly so called. The question then 
arises, if revelation does not and cannot com- 
plete science, enable ns to see God in his es- 
sence, or as he iis not merely to us but in him- 
self, which is promised to the saints, as says the 
Apostle, "it doth not yet appear what we shall 
be, but we know we shall be like him, for we 
shall see him as he is," — if, I repeat, revelation 
of the superintelligible does not give us this com- 
plete and perfect science, what does it do, or 
what is its value under the relation of science? 
Or, what is the real relation of faith to knowl- 
edge, and what light, if any, does it throw on 
science, or additional security does it give to 
science in the order of the intelligible? 

Faith is not sight, and does not seize directly 
its object either by intuition or by discursion, 
and hence the apostle speaks of faith as the 
substance, hypostasis, of things to be hoped 
for and the evidence of things not seen. It 
neither presents its object directly to the under- 
standing, nor represents an object intuitively 
presented or affiirmed. So much must be con- 
ceded in the outset, because its object is super- 
intelligible, above both reason and the senses, 
yet faith is an act of the understanding, an in- 



172 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

tellectnal act, and is in the intellect as its sub- 
ject, tanqnam in snbjecto, as we haye already 
seen; it must therefore have some relation to 
science and be in some sense knowledge. Were 
it not so, faith would be an irrational act, and 
the revelation of the superintelligible even to 
faith would be impossible, and in believing rev- 
elation nothing would be believed. 

Men of literary and scientific culture, who in 
our age reject the Christian revelation are little 
affected by the persiflage of a Yoitaire, the ver- 
bal and textual difficulties with the Bible so 
strenuously insisted on by unbelievers in the 
last century, or the arithmetical and chronolog- 
ical difficulties in the Jewish history set forth 
with so much earnest by a Colenso in the last 
half of the present century; but they regard a 
revelation of the superintelligible, or, as they 
phrase it, of the supernatural, as impossible to 
be made. What the alleged revelation affirms is 
either above reason or it is not. If above reason, 
or our understanding, the revelation reveals 
nothing, and is a mere form of words without 
any meaning for the human intellect; if it is 
not above reason, it only represents what is in- 
telligible to reason, and therefore reveals noth- 
ing superintelligible. 

The objection is grave and would be unan- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 173 

swerable and conclusive against any alleged rev- 
elation to man above reason, if we supposed, as 
some do, that there are two created orders, the 
one above the other, conflicting or not conflict- 
ing with each other, without real relation or 
connection between them. Hence they who as- 
sert two parallel orders, two creations, the one 
called natural, and the other supernatural, with 
no real or dialectic relation between them, have 
never vindicated and never can vindicate the 
revelation of what they call the supernatural 
order, against this formidable objection. The 
answer to the objection is in denying the suppo- 
sition of two such distinct and unrelated orders, 
and in showing that the intelligible and the 
superintelligible do not constitute two orders 
save in relation to our faculties, but are in real- 
ity only parts of one uniform whole. The dis- 
tinction between the natural and the supernat- 
ural is real, as is the distinction between creat- 
ure and creator. The supernatural is God and 
what he does immediately, and natural is that 
which is created and that which God does medi- 
ately through natural laws or second causes, as 
I have already explained. Creation is supernat- 
ural, considered either in its origin or end, and 
miracles are supernatural because they are not 
explicable by natural causes and can be wrought 



174 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

only by the finger of God. But in the sense de- 
fined supernatural is as intelligible as natural, 
and even more so, for the natural is intelligible 
only by the supernatural, as it is only by the 
creative act of God it exists. 

But there is no real distinction between the 
intelligible and the superintelligible, and they 
are distinguished at all only in relation to our 
faculties. They are identical, not two orders, 
but one only, to a mind large enough to compre- 
hend the whole at one yiew. There is no dis- 
tinction in God himself between his being and 
essence, the esse divinum and the essentia 
diyina, none between his essence and his attri- 
butes, or between one attribute and another, for 
he is, as say the theologians, most simple being 
and most pure act. His essence or what he is 
in himself is superintelligible to us from excess 
of light, in the happy phrase of Sir Walter 
Raleigh, "obscure from abundant claritie," 
which dazzles and blinds our eyes if we attempt 
to look it full in the face. In creatures again 
there is no distinction between substance and 
essence and properties. What we apprehend by 
our senses, what we understand by our intel- 
lect, and what transcends our reason and is not 
enlightened by it is one and the same thing. 
Creatures are really distinguished from God by 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 17S 

the divine creative act, but at the same time 
united to Mm by a real nexus, so that God and 
the created universe form only one dialectic 
whole, in which the superintelligible is simply 
the part that reason is too feeble to illume and 
which it therefore leaves in the shadow or in 
the dark. There is then no obstacle on the side- 
of the object to a revelation of the mysteries, and 
our apprehension of the great truths contained 
in them. 

Eevelation re-presents the part of reality 
which reason leaves unillumed by her light; but 
this very part itself is presented to us intuitively 
in its principles, for the principles of science,, 
without which science is impossible, are the 
principles of things or of the order of being.. 
There is no knowledge or intellectual fact with- 
out the ideal, ideas, called by some philosophers, 
necessary ideas and absolute ideas, which are 
and must be given intuitively, for they are a pri- 
ori, prior to experience and necessary to render 
experience even possible. These ideas are of 
two classes. In one class are the necessary, the 
universal, the infinite, the perfect, the immuta- 
ble, the eternal; in the other are the contin- 
gent, the particular, the finite, the imperfect, the - 
mutable, the temporal or temporary. The sec- 
ond class are all relative to the first and depend- 



176 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

ent on it; comsequently cannot be presented in- 
tuitiyely without it because they cannot exist 
without it. 

The ideas in the first class are all reducible to 
the single category of being, for the necessary, 
universal, &c., abstracted from being are simple 
nullities, as are all abstractions without their 
concretes, and therefore incapable of being in- 
tuitively presented. Besides, abstractions are 
formed by the mind operating on the intuition 
of the concrete, and therefore are not a priori 
and do not precede the operations of the mind, 
create and constitute the reason. They must 
then be concrete, real, and consequently reduced 
to the categors^ of being, they are one real, neces- 
sary, universal, infinite, perfect, immutable, and 
eternal being, that is to say, God, who is, as all 
theologians say, ens necessarium et reale. 

The ideas of the second class may all be re- 
duced to the category of existence, or existences, 
as distinguished from real and necessary being. 
No doubt, being and existence are often used 
as synonymous or convertible terms, and for or- 
dinary purposes, when it is not necessary to 
mark the distinction between them, no harm 
comes from so using them ; but in strictness ex- 
istence is not being, but from being, expressed 
by the prefix ex, from or by, and shows that ex- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 177 

istences are from being, and are not being in 
themselves, but in another, as says the Apostle, 
"In God we live and move and have onr being/' 
Bein^ is independent, self-exiistent, complete in 
itself, therefore necessary, universal, infinite, 
perfect, immutable, underived and eternal; ex- 
istence is contingent, derived, dependent, and 
incapable of sufficing for itself. 

The contingent, or second category, is pre- 
sented in intuition, not as ens or being, as the 
psychologists pretend, but as contingent, as rel- 
ative, therefore in its real relation to necessary 
being or God. It is this intuition of existences 
in their real relation to God that forms the prin-* 
ciple or basis of induction, the inductive sciences 
— the whole inductive philosophy, and gives va- 
lidity to the argument for the existence of God 
drawn from marks of design, wisdom, contriv- 
ance, the adaptation of means to ends, observed 
in the natural order. If the ideal intuition pre- 
sented nature as simple being or ens, and not 
in its distinction from being and in its relation 
to it, there could be no logical passage "through 
nature up to nature's God," and so far as logic 
could conclude anything, it would be that nature 
herself is real and necessary being, and nothing 
above it or beyond it be concluded or conceived.. 
The inductive argument for the existence of God,, 



178 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

the main argument on wMch St. ThomaiS relies, 
and the only one to which modern cultivators 
of the natural or exact sciences will listen for a 
moment, would and could hare no force, if ideal 
intuition did not present the contingent as con- 
tingent in its real relation to non-contingent be- 
ing. That relation is the relation of the effect to 
the cause, or of creature to creator, for it can be 
no other. There is no possible way in which 
contingent existences can proceed from being 
except by the creative act of being. Hence ideal 
intuition presents or affirms being, existences, 
and the creative act of being, which at once dis- 
tinguishes existences from God and unites them 
to him. Gioberti, whatever may be said or 
thought of him in other respects, has stated cor- 
rectly the ideal formula to be "U ente crea I'esis- 
tenze," being, or God, creates existences. 

This formula is accepted by every theologian, 
for it asserts only what is asserted in the first 
verse of Genesis and in the first article of the 
creed, but many deny it to be intuitive, or af- 
firmed in ideal intuition, and maintain that it is 
obtained only as the result of reflection or dis- 
cursive reason. The objection is founded on mis- 
taking ideal intuition, which is a priori and pre- 
cedes every intellectual act, and creates and con- 
stitutes the intellect itself, for empirical intui- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 179 

tion, or immediate yision, wMch is an intellect- 
ual act, as is eyident from the formula being op- 
posed on the ground that it implies that we have 
even in this life and by our natural powers intu- 
itive vision of God, which is as bad philosophy 
as theology. Intuition may be either empirical 
or ideal; empirical intuition stands opposed to 
discursion, and is knowing by looking directly 
on or immediately beholding the object; ideal 
intuition means what is immediately affirmed 
objectively to the mind as idea, as the principle 
of the mind itself, and stands for what is given 
by the creator in distinction from that which is 
obtained by the operation of the understanding, 
and in it the object is shown, not beheld. It is 
intuition because immediately shown to the 
mind, not because it is immediately beheld by it. 
The ontologists who contend that we know 
God by intuition in the empirical sense, or that 
we immediately behold him by our own intel- 
lectual act are well refuted by St. Thomas, and 
I)y the facts of experience. All experience, all 
common sense agrees with the assertion of the 
Scriptures that "no man hath seen God at any 
time," as I have explained in the fifth chapter. 
Nor is it pretended that the formula itself. Be- 
ing creates existences, is intuitively given, but 
that which it expresses. The formula is ob- 



180 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

tained by reflection, and never could have been 
obtained even by reflection without revelation 
re-presenting tlirougli language or sensible signs 
what is first presented in ideal intuition, as al- 
ready explained. The formula is the last 
achievement of philosophy, not its commence- 
ment, and thousands and millions of men have 
lived, thought, reflected, reasoned, philoso- 
phized without ever having attained to it. You 
find no recognition of the creative act, of crea- 
tion, in any gentile philosophy. The gentiles had 
evidently lost the tradition of creation, and sub- 
stituted for it generation, formation, or emana- 
tion, as modern heterodox philosophers substi- 
tute evolution, development, or manifestation. 
The new-born infant, the savage, or the rustic, 
unless taught the Cathechism, cannot say, "God 
created heaven and earth and all things there- 
in;" indeed, no man can say it from intuition 
alone, not even the greatest philosopher that 
ever lived, unless previously taught it by rev- 
elation or tradition. 

But that which is stated in the formula, or 
which the formula expresses, is given immedi- 
ately in intuition, and reflection aided by lan- 
guage can find it there, under the form of what 
is sometimes called reason, sometimes the prin- 
ciples of reason, sometimes absolute or neces- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 181 

sary ideas, and by ttie peripatetics and Kantists 
the categories of reason, and recognized by all 
as that to wMcli in all matters of demonstration - 
or proof the ultimate appeal is made, and on- 
which all scientific assent in the last analysis is; 
given. The considerations already presented- 
prove the ideal identical with the real, and af- 
firmed to the understanding by the reality itself, 
not by the mind's own act, nor as mere subject- 
ive forms of the mind, aiS Kant pretended. 

Taking the formula now as established, we 
find that it is adequate and expresses all the 
real and all the knowable, all the knowable be- 
cause all the real. Knowledge may fall short of 
the real, but can never exceed it. Whatever is 
real is either God or creature. Whatever exists 
and is distinguishable from God is creature, and 
whatever is and is not creature is God. There 
is no middle term possible. This is plain com- 
mon sense, and excludes that intermediary 
world of ideas or abstractions which iseems to 
have been asserted by Aristotle, and revelled in 
by some of the scholastics, and so effectually de- 
molished by Reid, the founder of the Scottish 
school. The peripatetics seem to have imagined 
a mundus logicus, distinct from the mundus 
physicus, and intermediary between God and 
creature, and between real and unreal, which 



182 FAITH A'JTD BCIENCE. 

jou can range neither in tlie category of being 
mor in that of existence. Leibnitz, that master- 
anind in Germany in the seventeenth century, 
was not wholly clear from it when he made the 
possible precede the real, and objected to St. 
Anselm's argument in his JProslogium for the ex- 
istence of God that to be conclnsiye it must first 
be proved that God is possible, and hence his dis- 
ciple Wolff places possibility outside of reality, 
instead of placing it in the power or ability of 
the real. Hegel does not escape the same error, 
any more than do his Buddhist prototypes, for 
lie places first das reine Seyn, or pure being, that 
is, simple possibility, which he is very right in 
maintaining is identical with das Mchtseyn, or 
not-being. Cousin falls into the same error in 
regard to his ideal or spontaneous reason, which 
evidently is not creature, and he maintains is not 
God, and the same mistake is committed by Eos- 
mini, whose "ens in genere'' he allows to be 
neither God nor creature, and yet he holds that 
the idea of it is the first idea of the mind, and 
by which the mind knows all that it does know, 
from which the logical conclusion would be that 
it knows nothing. 

The peripatetic categories are the forms of 
logic; but logic itself, what is that? Is it real 
or unreal? St. Thomas is the only one of the 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 183 

scholastics who probably, if the question had 
been asked him, would have given it a rational 
answer. He was not only a great saint, but one 
of the greatest philosophical geniuses that ever 
lived. What he would have answered we know 
from what he says of the ideal, or idea, that it 
exists in conceptu cum fundamento in re. This 
with St. Thomas means, not simply that the ideal 
is real, but the real in face of the human intel- 
lect, precisely what we mean by the intelligible. 
Reduce the categories to being, existence, and 
their relation, and you have in strict accordance 
with the doctrine of St. Thomas, the ideal for- 
mula as Gioberti himself understands and ex- 
plains it. The oflftce of the phantasmata, the in- 
telligible species, and the intellectus agens, 
which St. Thomas borrows from the peripatetics, 
is merely that which we have assigned to sen- 
sible representations, and reflection or active 
reason in seizing the ideal intuition, and in 
using it in demonstrating or proving the prin- 
ciples and facts presented by experience. They 
do not, with him, constitute a merely represent- 
ative world, a logical world, intermediary 
either between the real and the unreal, or be- 
tween God and creature, for he teaches that the 
object reached by the intellect is not the intel- 
ligible species, but the intelligible thing itself. 



184 FAITH AND SCIEXCE. 

Eetiiming now to the formula, we find that it 
asserts the principles of all reality, of the entire 
order of reality, and the entire order of science, 
and that these principles are intelligible, and 
known, consequently that the sensible and the 
intelligible, the intelligible and the superintel- 
ligible, the natural and the supernatural are by^ 
the creative act united in one dialectic whole^ 
and in their principles are intelligible, and even, 
intuitively known. Hence what is revealed in_ 
the mysteries is not something foreign to the- 
intelligible, but a part of that whole of which 
the principles are the principles of all science, 
and are presented to us in ideal intuition. 

The impossibility of a revelation on the 
ground that the superintelligible, or matter re-^ 
vealed, is of an order distinct from the intel- 
ligible without any real relation with it, cannot 
be insisted on, for that which is above the reach 
of our natural faculties is in the same real order- 
with that which is within their reach and forms, 
with it only one complete whole. There is a real 
relation between the two parts, and a real an- 
alogy between that which is revealed and that 
which is known or knowable. Indeed, through- 
out the universe there is a complete system of 
analogies or symbols in which the lower sym- 
bolizes the higher, the sensible the intelligible^ 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 185 

the intelligible the superintelligible, the natural 
the supernatural, creation itself the Creator. 
Uevelation, availing itself of these natural anal- 
ogies or symbols, is able to shadow forth to us 
that which in itself surpasses our power of di- 
rect apprehension, and thus faith is knowledge 
T3y analogy, or analogical knowledge. We do 
not see what is revealed in the mysteries directly 
face to face, but indirectly ais reflected from 
these analogies most strikingly explained by the 
Apostle, now, by faith, "we see through a glass 
darkly, per speculum in aenigmate," as mirrored 
in the analogies borrowed from the world 
known to us. 

If we study carefully the Holy Scriptures, and 
the discourses of our Lord, we shall find that 
they illustrate what they advance, even the pro- 
foundest mysteries they reveal, and enable the 
understanding to grasp something, by analogies 
taken from the natural world and the domestic 
and social relations of men. Birds, plants, 
flowers, the eagle, the dove, the rose, the lily, 
the grass of the field, the mustard-seed, the fig- 
tree, and the olive-plant; the vine and its 
branches, the vineyard and the husbandman; 
kingdom, master, servant, rich and poor, hus- 
band and wife, father and son; all the analogies 
and symbols of nature are pressed into the ser- 



186 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

yice of siiperintelligible triitli, and go far 
towards bringing it within tlie sphere of reason^, 
and the surprise is that by meditation and 
steady contemplation the mind can penetrate sa 
far into the hidden sense of the mysteries, not 
that it can penetrate no further. Some men 
whose authority has not been impeached have 
broached the "metaphysica sublimior," which 
pretends, now that the mysteries are revealed^ 
to be able by natural reason to demonstrate not 
only that the mysteries do not contradict rea- 
son, but that they are true, using revelation in 
relation to the superintelligible as we have 
shown it is used in relation to the intelligible; 
but this, however, seems to me going too far and 
not making the proj)er account of the evident 
limitations of reason. 

The fact already noted, that we can never 
bring ourselves to believe that the limit of our 
faculties is the limit of reality is not mthout im- 
portant bearings, not only on the insufficiency 
of reason for full and universal science, but on 
the ability or aptitude to receive a revelation of 
the superintelligible. This fact, which has been 
noted in all ages and is undeniable, Gioberti 
calls a faculty, and names it "sovrintelligenza,'*" 
the faculty of superlntelligence, but he standi 
alone, I believe, in so naming it, and by faculty 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 187 

is usually understood a power in the human soul 
to attain to its special object, but this is not a 
power by which the soul knows or attains to the 
superintelligible, which would be a contradiction 
in terms and inadmissible. This is rather the 
sense of the lack of power than the power itself. 
It is the soul's sense of her own impotence, and 
her own potentiality, or that she is in potentia 
to more than she is, but not a power by which 
she does or may attain to more. It is negatiye 
rather than positive, and the most that can be 
said is that it is an attitude, I hardly dare say 
aptitude, of the soul to receive a revelation of 
the superintelligible. Some philosophers, chief- 
ly of the transcendental school, call it the faculty 
of faith and rank it in the hierarchy of the soul 
above reason; they also regard it as a secret 
sense, an intimate perception of the infinite, 
clear to itself, but wholly unintelligible to rea- 
son or understanding, a sort of spiritual sense, 
constituting those who have it strong, spiritual 
men, gnostics in the highest sense, and quite su- 
perior to ordinary mortals, able, as some of them 
say, "to see the invisible, and to look into the 
very abyss of being." But these seem to con- 
found a conscious want of the soul with a power 
of the soul, and to conclude the presence of the 
power from a deep and abiding sense of its ab- 



188 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

sence. ScMeiermacher regards it as a sense of 
dependence, or the soul's sense of her own insuf- 
ficiency, and makes it the basis of the religious 
sentiment which he thinks may be strong in men 
who have no religious belief, no, not so much as 
the belief in the existence of God. The sense of 
dependence, or the souFs sense of her own insuf- 
ficiency, is felt in a greater or less degree by all 
men, even by those who profess to believe in the 
Godship of man. But the mysterious psycholog- 
ical fact or faculty in question seems to be some- 
thing more than a sense of dependence, and an 
intimation, yague and indefinite though it be, 
that there is a reality beyond that which is ap- 
prehensible by our natural powers, which creates 
in it a longing to be more than we are and to 
have what we have not, which makes us dissatis- 
fied with every limited good, with the visible, 
and to sigh for the invisible and the unattaina- 
ble, so that the eye is never satisfied with seeing, 
the ear with hearing, nor the heart with under- 
standing. 

Plato notes the fact and regards it as the 
soul's reminiscence of what she was in a pre- 
existing state, and explains it as her regret of 
a lost freedom and grandeur, which causes her 
to beat her head against the walls of the dun- 
geon in which she is confined while united to the 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 189 

l)ody, and sigh for deliverance when she may 
wing her way up to the empyrean, where she 
"will repose again in the bosom of the Divinity. 
Some theologians, half agreeing with Plato, find 
in it the evidence of a primitive fall, and explain 
its existence by original sin, and others suppose 
it a gracious striving of the spirit of God within 
us to remind us that God designs us for a super- 
natural beatitude, and never suffering us to re- 
pose in the creature or to be satisfied with the 
■highest conceivable natural good. But however 
theologians and philosophers may explain it, all 
take note of it, and bear witness to its existence 
:as a remarkable and mysterious psychological 
fact, inseparable from the soul in this present 
state of existence. 

St. Thomas maintains that man has a natural 
desire to know God in his essence, as he is in 
himself, and therefore implicitly for the beatific 
vision, what constitutes the blessedness of the 
saints when their pilgrimage is ended and they 
have safely arrived at home. It is not, in the 
view of St. Thomas or any of the great fathers 
and theologians, something supernatural in 
man, not something superinduced on human 
nature, not a reminiscence of the freedom and 
grandeur of a pre-existence, not the wail of the 
soul over a lost Eden and a primitive innocence, 



190 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

but the sense of an nnattained and by her own 
powers unattainable destiny. It is the soul's 
sense of her own incompleteness, of the unreal- 
ized possibilities or potentialities of her own na- 
ture, that is, that she lacks the necessary com- 
plement of her existence, and of her capacity to 
be more than she is, or to receive her fulfilment, 
or in other words, that she has in her by the 
divine aid a capacity for progress. But as the 
soul's complement or fulfilment is not in the in- 
telligible, nor in the natural, it is in some sort 
an intimation or a prolepsis of the superintelligi- 
ble, and of a supernatural destiny, which fits or 
renders her apt to receive the natural revelation 
of the mysteries, in which is supplied to faith 
and to hope precisely what her nature lacks, and 
is necessary to complete or fill up the design for 
which she was created and exists. Revelation 
through faith supplies the part of science that 
she felt was missing, and as it comes to her in 
faith she receives it not as something foreign or 
strange, but as a sweet melody that has been 
once heard, but now forgotten and impossible to 
recall. 

This psychological fact or faculty, for a faculty 
after all it may be, if considered in relation to 
the object presented by faith which actualizes 
it, transforms possibility into power, connects 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 191 

the act of belieYing with the act of knowing as 
revelation through the unity of truth connects 
the object believed with the objects known or 
knowable, and really, not artificially, mechanic- 
ally, or fictitiously; so that faith is really, as we 
have defined it, analogical science. Faith in the 
revealed mysteries, — I speak of faith here as 
simple intellectual assent, fides humana, not of 
faith as a virtue, fides theologica, which requires 
the action of the will, and not possible without 
the assistance of grace or the donum fidei, — ^is 
therefore as simple, as natural, and as easy as 
the belief of such historical events within the 
intelligible order as have not fallen under our 
personal observation, when they are duly au- 
thenticated by competent and trustworthy testi- 
mony. Eevelation places the truth of the mys- 
teries in a relation to science strictly analogous 
to that borne by past or distant historical events, 
and even to that borne by the facts which he 
himself has not personally observed used by the 
inductive philosopher in constructing the sci- 
ence of geography, geology, philology, zoology, 
biology, or the so-called sociology, a real science,, 
but with a barbarous name. These facts are re- 
ceived on testimony as well as the revealed mys- 
teries, and the testimony sufficient in the one 
case is sufflcient in the other. This follows 



3-92 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

necessarily from tLe fact we hare established 
that the intelligible and snperintelligible are in 
the order of reality only one order, that what is 
within the reach of reason and what is above 
Teason are really only parts of one nniform dia- 
lectic whole, expressed in that diyine judgTnent, 
type and gTonnd of all real and possible judg- 
ments, which we call the ideal formnla, or ideal 
intuition. The mysteries are implicitly affirmed 
in that intuition, and revelation is their analog- 
ical explication as history is the explication of 
that portion wliich passes into the actual experi- 
ence of mankind. 

But in showing the possibility of revelation 
and the relation of faith in the mysteries to sci- 
ence we have gone further and actually pre- 
>sented no mean proof at least of the truth of the 
mysteries, and through that truth of the histor- 
ical fact that man has received a supernatural 
revelation, ilt is argTied that the mysteries are 
snperintelligible and therefore incapable of be- 
ing known by us without supernatural revela- 
tion. It is argued also that if the order to be re- 
vealed has no real connection with the intelligi- 
ble order, but. is an order wholly separate from 
:it, and wholly above it, no revelation of it is pos- 
sible, because nothing in the intelligible indi- 
vcates it, implies it, or offers any analogy to it, 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 193- 

by which the mind can either directly or indi- 
rectly apprehend or get hold of it, and therefore 
if made would be a mere form of words signify- 
ing nothing. I have answered this objection 
first, by showing that the superintelligible is. 
only so in relation to us, and is implicitly af- 
firmed to reason in ideal intuition, second by 
showing that it is demanded by the soul as the 
complement of its own existence and science, and 
finally by showing that it can be and is brought 
indirectly to the understanding by natural sym- 
bols or analogies borrowed brom the sensible 
and intelligible worlds, chiefly from the sensible,. 
Now it is evident at a glance that only the 
truth could be thus analogically presented to* 
the understanding. There must be a real and,, 
so to speak, a natural relation between the an- 
alogue and the analogies, between the symbols> 
and the reality symbolized, or else there would 
and could be no symbol or analogy in the case. 
But such relation is not possible in the case of 
falsehood, which being nothing can have nO' 
analogies with anything real or with anything 
natural or real symbols. A revelation of false- 
hood would be as impossible as the ideal intui- 
tion of the unreal, for it would present no 
analogue, nothing to be analogically repre- 
sented. Such revelation could find in nature no . 



194 FAITH AXD SCIENCE. 

analogies and could use natural analogies or sen- 
sible and intelligible analogies only by forcing, 
mutilating, or distorting tliem. On the other 
hand, a revelation that meets the sensible and 
intelligible analogies without forcing, mutilat- 
ing, or distorting, them giyes full significance to 
the symbolism of nature, is and must be true, 
for only the truth could supply the analogues, 
and only God knows all natural symbolism well 
enough to gire it throughout a full and con- 
sistent meaning. There can be no doubt that 
such is the fact with regard to the Christian 
revelation, as I shall show if I come to treat of 
the mysteries separately, and therefore the 
Ohristian revelation is true and made by God 
himself. 

But this argument from analogy, conclusive 
as it may be, does not stand alone; but is more 
than confirmed as to the fact of revelation by the 
testimony of history. In showing that what is 
revealed is in the real world of the same order 
with what is intelligible, that it is even im- 
plicitly affirmed in ideal intuition which pre- 
sents the principles of all the real whether nat- 
ural or supernatural, intelligible or superintel- 
ligible, and that it bears a real analogy to what 
is known and responds to an internal demand or 
deeply felt want of the soul, I have shown that 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. ' 195 

revelation as a fact falls into the category of 
ordinary historical facts, and is as easily proved 
as any other fact of history, and in the same 
way, — by competent and adequate testimony. 
Whether revelation has been made or not is sim- 
ply an historical question, and must be deter- 
mined, as any other historical question, by the 
documents and monuments in the case. 

It is no part of my present purpose to produce 
the documents and monuments, or the historical 
testimony to the fact that the revelation has 
been made, or to prove that it is a well- authenti- 
cated historical fact, for this has been done by 
the Christian apologists, both orthodox and 
heterodox, in a manner and with an erudition 
that leaves nothing to be desired. The historical 
testimony has been shown to be complete, an 
unbroken chain of evidence, with not a link 
wanting, and stronger than can be adduced in 
favor of any other 'facts of ancient history. I 
content myself with this simple assertion, which 
cannot be successfully controverted, because the 
diflficulies of unbelievers do not arise, and never 
have arisen, from any conviction on their part 
of the defectiveness or insufficiency of the testi- 
mony, regarded as simple historical testimony, 
but from the conviction of its incompetency. 
They hold that historical testimony is not ger- 



196 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



mane to the question, and consequently no^ 
amount of such testimony would or could duly 
authenticate the fact of reyelation. They con- 
tend that the supernatural in any form or degree 
is absolutely unprovable. Hume expresses their 
common sentiment when, asisuming a miracle to 
be contrary to the course of nature, he says, it 
is far more reasonable to believe that all the 
world lies than it is to believe that nature ever 
goes out of her course, for that men will lie is 
well known from experience, but of nature going 
out of her course there is no experience. We 
have no experience of nature acting against her 
own laws. Miracles therefore cannot by any 
amount of testimony be proved. To prove a mir- 
acle would demand a greater miracle, and to 
prove that greater miracle would demand an- 
other still greater, and thus on in an ever aug- 
menting series ad infinitum, which is physically^ 
impossible and logically absurd. 

Hume's false assumptions and transparent 
sophistry will be replied to when treating of 
miracles ; here it is sufficient to say that the real 
difficulties felt by unbelievers are philosophical 
rather than historical, and the difficulty with the 
apologist is that while unbelievers have phi- 
losoi^hy enough to object,, they have too little to 
be answ^ered. Had they more real philosophical 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 197 

science they would themselves see that their ob- 
jections, all rest on a principle really nntenablej, 
or on a misapprehension, or misrepresentations 
of facts. Thus Hume's famous argument, the 
substance of which we have just given, is based 
on the assumption that the supernatural is never 
a fact of experience, which is not only false, but 
a manifest begging of the question, and also on 
the assumption that a miracle violates the lawsi 
of nature, or diverts nature from her course, 
which is not true, for a miracle is simply a sen- 
sible or intelligible fact not* explicable by nat- 
ural laws or natural causes, and therefore must 
be attributed to a supernatural cause, and there- 
fore as to the proof stands on the same footing 
with nature herself, for nature is explicable only 
by being referred to a supernatural cause or 
creator, as affirmed in the ideal formula, dv ideal 
intuition. It is because the objections are not 
to the sufficiency but to the competency of his^ 
torical testimony that I have felt it necessary by 
establishing the ideal formula, the relation of 
the natural and supernatural, and of the intel- 
ligible and the superintelligible, to show the real 
relation between faith and science, and thus 
proving that historical testimony is germane to 
the question and as competent to establish the 
fact of revelation or a miracle as the fact of the 



198 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

wars between the ancient Greeks and Persians, 
or tlie Grallic and civil wars of Julius Caesar. 

Referring for the historical proofs of the fact 
of revelation to the works of the Christian apolo- 
gists both orthodox and heterodox, having by 
mj philosophical and theological explanations 
shown the competency of such proofs and re- 
moved the real objections unbelieverts or pure 
rationalists find to admitting them, there re- 
mains to be considered in this chapter the aid 
which the analogical knowledge which we call 
faith affords to science properly so called, or the 
service it renders in supplying the defect pointed 
out in pure rationalism. 

I say defect, for I do not agree at all with 
those who declaim against reason as a false or 
illusory light. I know no truer light than reason 
as far as it goes, and it is to reason that revela- 
tion itself is made and accredited. The intellect, 
as St. Thomas maintains, is true, and is never 
falise. All that is pretended is that it is incom- 
plete, and does not take in all reality, which can 
be done only by the divine mind, or the intel- 
ligence of God. There are no greater sophists in 
the world than they who would build up revela- 
tion on the ruins of reason, or found faith on 
scepticism; and it is to guard us against so fatal 
an error that the Holy See requires us to hold 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 199 

that the existence of God, the immateriality of 
the soul, and hnman liberty can be proved with 
certaint}^ by reason prior to faith. By far the 
larger part of the propositions contained 
in the syllabus of errors attached to the 
papal encyclical of December 8, 1864, and 
which the Holy Father censured are errors 
which tend to undermine reason, rational 
morality, and civil society. Whether all the 
€hurch teaches harmonizes or not with reason, 
nothing' is more certain than that she teaches 
her children to respect reason and to recognize 
it as a true light as far as it goes, and hence 
Melchior Oano enumerates natural reason 
among the loci theologici, or sources whence the 
theologian is to draw in determining what is the 
faith or its true interpretation. 

It should also be remarked that faith exclus- 
ively taken does not include all the gracious as- 
sistance we receive in the conduct of life, or in 
the fulfilment of the purpose of our existence, 
and moreover, that faith itself gives us aid be- 
yond that which it gives directly to science, and 
that its indirect aid is far greater than its direct 
aid even to science. This is said to prevent any 
misapprehension on the part of theologians who, 
while I am treating of faith as simple belief, 
may fear that I forget that faith is also a theo- 



200 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

logical Tirtue, and not elicited without the sub- 
jective as well as the objective aid of divine 
grace. 

But to return to the question. Faith cer» 
tainly does not supply the defect of reason by 
elevai:ing us to the beatific vision. It gives us^ 
no direct knowledge beyond the sphere of the in- 
telligible, but analogical knowledge of the whole 
superintelligible reality embraced in the re- 
vealed mysteries, and gives to science in regard 
to the superintelligible the precise sort of aid 
which history gives to science in regard to the 
intelligible, that is, the history of events of 
which we are not eye mtnesses, and theology is 
as really and trul}- a a science as history itself. 
I know as well that God is Trinity, that the sec- 
ond person in the Trinity became incarnate ta 
redeem fallen man and elevate him to super- 
natural union with God, that he is created for 
God and can find his beatitude only in being re- 
generated by the Holy Ghost in him, and glori- 
fied with him in the glory of the Father, as I 
know there was such a person as Alexander the 
Great, as Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte^ 
or George Washington, or as I know any of the 
events recorded in ancient or modern history of 
which I have not been an eye-witness, — as well 
as I know the facts of any of the inductive 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



201 



sciences, which I know only by the report of 
others. Now, as we could hardly construct any 
science without borrowing from the testimony 
of others, and as the larger part of every in- 
ductive science really depends on history, so 
would our science dwindle almost to nothing if 
we eliminate from it all that we owe directly or 
indirectly to the revelation of the mysteries. 

Faith, indeed, is only representative knowl- 
edge, and we do not know through it what the 
superintelligible is in itself, but we do know that 
it exists, that it is real, and is only for a time 
hidden from us, and in due time it will be seen 
with open vision. We know also its grand out- 
lines, and have only to wait till of age, till we 
have arrived at the stature of perfect men in 
Ohrist Jesus, till we have finished our course, 
reached the goal, to have these outlines filled up 
and our knowledge completed by a real union 
with the divine intelligence itself. True, we 
must as yet walk by faith, not by sight, but it is 
with the full assurance that faith will soon be 
converted into sight. The son while a minor 
serves, is under obedience, no less than the slave, 
but he looks forward to the day of his majority 
when he knows he shall be free, while the slave 
can see no term to his minority but death. Faith 
does not indeed present directly the reality the 



202 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

soul hungers and thirsts for, but it assures the 
soul that the reality that meets her wants, that 
appeases her craving, fulfils her instinctive de- 
sires, and justifies her sense of something beyond 
what she is or has, is no vain illusion, no morbid 
dream, but really does exist, is attainable, and 
is not already attained because the progress of 
the soul is not yet completed, and its majority 
is not yet reached. Faith thus proves itself to 
be, as the Apostle says, the substance (hypostasis 
the substance, not being) of things to be hoped 
for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith, 
though not bringing to the soul complete or per- 
fect satisfaction, promises it that satisfaction, 
and thus enables it to repose securely in the 
knowledge it has, frees it from all anxiety or 
perturbation, and permits it to wait tranquil 
and serene till the day when faith loses itself in 
sight, or hope in fruition shall arrive. 

Certainly revelation cannot remove scientific 
scepticism, or those doubts which call in ques- 
tion the validity of science and trustworthiness 
of reason or the reality of her light when they 
have once arisen and become fixed, for the cer- 
tainty given by revelation can never be greater 
than the certainty of the reason to which it is 
made and authenticated, and no one who doubts 
reason can have faith in revelation. A more ab- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 203 

surd method of evangelical demonstration was 
never adopted than that of beginning by the re- 
jection of reason as a false light, a deceptive 
guide. But faith in revelation prevents doubts 
of science from being generated in the mind, not 
by stopping inquiry or investigation, but by an- 
swering it beforehand. Scepticism in its proper 
sense, that is, a doubt not simply of revelation, 
but of science, the truthfulness of the senses and 
understanding is impossible in practical life as 
well as in speculation. 'No man doubts that he 
doubts, or as Byron isays, doubts that doubting 
is doubting, for doubt is an intellectual act, and 
affirms the truth of reason as much as an act of 
belief. Doubt never extends really to doubt of 
the existence of the doubter. But the inability 
of reason to reconcile all the contrarieties and to 
clear up all the mysteries of life or to answer all 
the questions the soul asks, gives occasion for 
the mind to become perplexed, the soul to be dis- 
turbed, and the affections unfixed and floating 
to be sources of misery instead of joy and de- 
light. Enveloped in mystery, darkness before 
and behind, within and without, the mind loses 
her reckoning, knows not where she is, what to 
think, what to rely on, and feels that nothing is 
certain, but that all things are floating and 
fleeting. This sad state of the mind and soul is 



-2^4 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

striking in most of tlie later Greek poets, is de- 
tected, some think, in Shakspeare, especially in 
his Hamlet, and is unmistakable in Goethe and 
Byron, Shelley and Lamartine, in Goodwin, 
Brockden Brown, Dana, Bulwer, Balzac, and 
Georges Sand, and it leaves its mark on the 
literature and art of every unbelieving age. 
Wherever we find it it is a sure indication of the 
loss of faith in tradition or the corruption or 
loss of the tradition itself. 

Faith in divine revelation in proportion as it 
is known and believed in its purity and integrity 
prevents this state of mind, this perplexity, per- 
turbation, these inward doubts and question- 
ings, not by stifling mental activity, but by an- 
swering them beforehand, by assuring the mind 
that these difficulties do not arise from the con- 
troversies or discrepancies of things themselves 
or lack of dialectic order and consistency in the 
world of reality, but solely from its ignorance or 
inability to take in the whole, from the fact that 
it sees only parts, and these as disjecta membra, 
not in their living synthesis as one dialectic 
whole, and by giving it the assurance that this 
ignorance on its part is only temporary and will 
dissolve in light on the day of its majority. 
"Now," says the Apostle, "we know in part and 
prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 205 

«liall come that which is in part shall be done 
awaj. When I was a child I spake as a child, I 
thought as a child, but when I became a man I 
put away the things of a child. We see now 
through a glass darkly, but then face to face. 
;N^ow I know in part, but then I shall know as I 
am known." 

Add now to the simple intellectual belief in 
reyelation what theologians call the grace or in- 
fused habit of faith, the donum fidei, which 
though it gives no extension to our mental vis- 
ion or understanding, enables the mind to be- 
lieve with a supernatural firmness and energy, 
and it is evident that faith, while it is in no sense 
the ground of science, is full security against any 
doubts of the reality of science, or those inward 
questionings which throw doubts on rea- 
son herself, — not indeed because it is in 
itself more certain than reason, but be- 
cause it is a firm persuasion of the 
mind that reason as well as revelation is true, 
and that whatever she dictates or affirms is to 
be received as unquestionable. Faith taken in 
its theological sense is in the order of the end, 
the teleological order, in which creation is con- 
summated and man is perfected, attains to his 
supreme good, realizes his destiny or end for 
which he is created,, now future to us, but pres- 



203 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

ent to God. Faitli initiates us into this order, is 
the first step in the return of existences towards 
God as their final canse and only beatitude, and 
is itself initial beatitude, initial intuitiye yision 
of God in his essence or as he is in himself, and 
in him of the essences of all things. In it is be- 
gun that new life in Christ of which the end is 
glorification with him in the glory of the Father. 
With this faith the contrarieties of life disap- 
pear, the soul feels herself no longer confined in 
a narrow prison beating her head against" the 
thick walls of her dungeon, but feels herself 
enlarged and her lungs expand vrith the free 
and pure air of heaven, and has even a fore- 
taste of the joys of eternity. 

But the question of science I have thus far 
considered in a speculatire, rather than a prac- 
tical sense. Science should always be in order 
to practice, as the end of knowledge is not sim- 
ply to know, but to act, and its use is in enlight- 
ening the will and directing the executive pow- 
ers of the soul. Science availeth little till it is 
converted into wisdom, which is science applied 
to the true purposes of existence, or the real 
end of man. The great quarrel of Socrates with 
the sophists of Ms time was precisely here, and 
he censured them because they gave to science 
no moral aim.^ and neglected to consider it as 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 207 

having any relation to the conduct or practical 
duties of life. He sought to make it serve a 
moral purpose, which is what was meant by his 
laboring to bring philosophy down from the 
clouds to the earth. No representation could 
be further from the truth than that in the 
"Clouds" of Aristophanes. Plato was true to the 
spirit of his master and his philosophy was di- 
rected to fitting man for a return to union with 
God. Wisdom, or moral science, is the more im- 
portant part of science, is in fact the crown of 
all science. 

Now moral science is even less practicable 
without the revelation of the mysteries than 
speculative science, and it is precisely in rela- 
tion to moral science that faith renders the most 
aid. Reason knows that the end of man is not 
in nature, that the souFs supreme good, which 
is the same thing, is not to be found in the crea- 
ture, or in any finite good, and is able to say that 
if man have an end, if he have a supreme good^ 
it is in the supernatural; but she cannot say 
that he has such good, what it is, whether it is 
attainable, and if attainable, by w^hat means. 
Faith steps in here to the relief of reason, re- 
moves its doubts and supplies its defects. It 
assures us that man has a supreme good, that 
it consists in a supernatural union with or pos- 



"SOS FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

session of God, in being made a partaker of Ms 
divine nature; it teaclies that it is attainable, 
and instructs us as to the means and appliances 
necessary to gain it. In all this it supersedes not 
but it supplements reason, and prepares science 
for its conversion into msdom, which is the prin- 
cipal thing. Hence it is moral science deterio- 
rates as men lose their faith in revelation, and 
forget its instructions, and hence, too, we find 
the highest types of virtue and the sublimest 
•examples of sanctity and moral heroism only 
with those who retain divine revelation in its 
purity and integrity. 

Nor is the indirect service that faith renders 
to science, whether speculative or moral, to 
count for nothing. We do not always find the 
largest science accompanying the strongest 
faith, but we never find it where there is not 
strong and energetic faith, or where the tradi- 
tion of revelation has been lost or retained only 
in a fragmentary or debased form. In Greece 
the great philosophers are the earnest men, of 
; strong but an impure faith, like Socrates, Plato, 
and Aristotle, not the professional sophists, who 
were without faith as without principle. With 
the Jews, a believing and earnest people, who 
Iiad revelation in its purity, we find indeed not 
philosophy as a detached or separate science, 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 209 

but we find the rational or scientific element 
of thought more highly cultivated and more 
fully developed, and really a higher, broad- 
er and truer philosophy than in any gentile 
nation. The Jewish Scriptures afford ample 
proof of this in the notices they give us of the 
intellectual and moral culture of the nation. The 
epocb.s in which faith flourishes are those in 
w^hich philosophy receives its most vigorous 
growth, and whenever faith withers and droops 
philosophy loses all its sap and soon becomes: 
dry and dead. The great ages of faith, as the 
first four centuries of our era, the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries, the seventeenth century 
and our own are the great ages of philosophy^ 
while the fifteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth cen- 
turi€S, marked by the decline of faith, are equal- 
ly marked by the decline of philosophy. Faith 
since the Apostles went forth from that "upper 
room" in Jerusalem to convert the world to the 
Gospel, faith never came nearer suffering a total 
eclipse than in the last century, and never was 
reason more dishonored than by a shallow ma- 
terialism which was then put forth in her name. 
In the present century faith partially revives^ 
and few men would now place the supreme good 
in the pleasures of the senses, regard the soul as 
a sensation transformed with the Abbe Gondii- 



?10 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

lac, and define man with Doctor Cabanis "a di- 
gestive tube open at both ends/' reduce him first 
to a man-plant and then to a man-machine with 
LaMettrie, or ascribe man's superiority oyer the 
horse with Helyetius to the accidental fact that 
liis forearms terminate in flexible fingens instead 
of an inflexible hoof. If the chemical physiology 
of animals and plants still has its adyocates it is 
now pretty generally conceded tht the phenom- 
ena of life are due to a more subtile principle 
than is detected in the chemical laboratory. Eyen 
a Draper admits an immaterial principle in man 
^nd Agassiz the existence of God, though neither 
finds much for either to do. But still there is an 
upward tendency, and the positiyists, who are 
disposed to say with the astronomer Lalande: 
^*I haye never seen God at the end of my tele- 
scope," find it necessary to assert ^^le grand etre," 
and to offer him prayers and sacrifices. 

Philosophy is the chief of the sciences, of the 
inductive sciences as well as the deductive, for 
it is the science of the the ideal, and without the 
ideal no induction, or what Kant calls a syn- 
thetic judgment a posteriori, is possible. Ages 
and nations in which philosophy is strong and 
i2;orous are ages of scientific invention and 
scientific progress. The greater part of the inven- 
tions and discoveries which have wrought such 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 211 

mighty changes date from the seventeenth cen- 
tury or the middle ages ; the last century and the 
present have only extended the application of 
principles which more vigorous ages had discov- 
ered. 

I am not depreciating the value of experi- 
mental science, nor the vast materials for the 
inductive or synthetic sciences accumulated hy 
the industry and curiosity of the physicists and 
naturalists of this age, and the warmest admir- 
ers of the scholastics must admit that they ne- 
glected almost entirely the observation of facts, 
and added little to the stock accumulated and 
transmitted by Aristotle and Pliny. The man 
who permitted himself to make experiments 
like Albertus M]agnus or Friar Bacon, was by 
the people only emerging from barbarism sus- 
pected of magic or too close an intimacy with 
evil spirits. Nor am I making philosophy as now 
understood the ancilla or slave of faith, any 
more than I am making faith the ancilla or 
slave of science. The Holy See has defined or 
required philosophers and theologians to hold 
that faith and reason are mutual helpers, or mu- 
tually assist each other, and my purpose is to 
show how they do mutually assist one another. 
I do not build reason on faith, nor faith on rea- 
son; but there can be no faith without reason, 



212 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

and no full development of reason without faith.. 
Each serves the other, and supplies what the 
other lacks, plainly indicating that man wa& 
never intended for what is called pure nature,, 
that even if God consistently with his own na- 
ture and essence could have created man in a 
state of pure nature and left him in it, he has 
not done so, but from the first designed him, as 
revelation teaches us, for a supernatural end or 
destiny, to which he cannot, of course, attain 
without supernatural assistance or what theo- 
logians call grace, that is, the immediate actioQ 
or efficacious presence of the Holy Ghost. 

Faith needs reason, as I never cease to repeat,, 
but reason also needs faith, as I have shown, not 
only faith in history, but also in the mysteries 
affirmed by revelation, and it is in relation to 
these mysteries that reason receives its grandest 
developments. The science of reason has almost 
entirely been created by efforts to explain, to 
apprehend, to establish, to defend, or to over- 
throw or disprove these mysteries. Theology,, 
though it takes its data from revelation, is in 
reality a human or rational science, whose aim,, 
according to St. Augustine, is to produce, defend,, 
and confirm the faith that conducts to true beati- 
tude. None of the mathematical or of the induc- 
tive sciences make for their construction any- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 213 

thing like eo heavy demands on reason^ or so call 
forth and exercise her higher powers, as the- 
ology, and in most men reason is too weak or toa 
little developed to see any reason at all in the 
wonderful achievements of reason in the field 
of theology. Nothing so tests the strength of 
reason or shows so fully its power as the in- 
vestigations and discussions of the theologians 
in regard to the Trinity, the Incarnation, Re- 
demption, Grace and human ability, Predestina- 
tion and human liberty, virtue and its rewards,, 
and sin and its consequences. To the light and 
superficial these investigations and discussions, 
seem frivolous and a waste of time, and men 
gain the reputation of wits by sneering at them^ 
or attempting to turn them into ridicule, but 
there are more things in heaven and earth than 
are dreamed of in the philosophy of a Gibbon or 
a Voltaire, and their wit can excite mirth only 
in those who understand nothing of the high 
themes against which it is directed. The salva° 
tion of even reason herself was involved in that 
simple Greek diphthong about which GibboB 
sneeringly says mankind cut each other's throats 
for a hundred years. The debate between the 
Homoousoians and the Homoeousians, though 
apparently about a single diphthong, involved 
the highest possible interests of humanity foF 



214 FAITH AND SCIENCE. 

both. time, and eternity, as will be shown when 
we come to speak specially of the Incarnation, 
and as is evident also to reason herself from the 
fact that man has no natural destiny, and that 
his supernatural destiny is unattainable save 
through the incarnation of the Word, which 
could never have taken place if the Word was 
only like God, and not God himself. 

These investigations and discussions have car- 
ried us far into the secret nature of things^ 
and given us a knowledge of the intelligible re- 
lations of things, of God, the human soul, human 
nature, of the universe, of the relation of man to 
the universe and of man and the universe to 
God. Even the unbeliever born in Christian 
lands and brought up in Christian schools has a 
stronger and better developed reason than had 
the unbeliever under paganism, and an Auguste 
Comte is much in advance of old Epicurus or any 
of the herd from his sty. Eliminate from intel- 
lectual and moral science all that reason owes 
to her efforts to understand the mysteries in 
their relation with one another, and with, our 
natural powers, and our actual science would 
be reduced to the dimensions of that of the child 
or the savage. The difference between the child 
and the full-grown man, or between the savage^ 
the North American Indian, and the New Zea- 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 215 

lander and the Italian, Frenchman, Englishman,, 
German, or citizen of the United States shows 
what reason owes to faith in the mysteries. It 
is easy then to understand the indirect aid ren- 
dered to reason even in the order of the intelli- 
gible and to show to those who regard faith as 
antagonistical to reason that they are not well 
read up in the facts of the case, and that the 
vision of the true believer extends over a wider- 
horizon, and is clearer and distincter than that 
of the infidel or rationalist. 

It was the writer^s intention to treat in de- 
tail all the dogmas and mysteries of faith, and 
he still hopes to do so ; but these will be reserved 
for another volume, if he should live to com- 
plete that labor. In the meantime he commits 
to the world this attempt to show the principle- 
of the harmony of faith and science, the medium^ 
of their reconciliation, with the hope that the 
way in which abler, more learned and scientific 
men can take up and solve the problem may be 
in some degree indicated, and the solution facil- 
itated. 

THE END. 



INDEX. 



Abelard, 123, 

Absolute, 30. 

Abstract, 46. 

Abstractions, 47, 54, 59, 82, 149, 181. 

Adam, 139, 154, 155. 

Agassiz, 210. 

Albertus Magnus. 211. 

Alexander the Great, 200. 

Analogy, 185, 193. 

Analysis, 20. 

Animals, Intelligence of, 97, 109. 

Anselm, St., 88, 91, 182. 

Antagonism of Reason and Faith, 

16, 
Apologists, Christian, 195. 
Arianism, 24. 
Aristophanes, 207. 
Aristotle, 12, 23, 41, 59, 73, 78, 90, 112, 

137, 145, 181, 211. 
Athenagoras, 24. 
Augustine. St., 11. 15, 24, 62, 65. 66, 

90, 91, 139, 144, 212. 
Bacon, Friar, 211. 
Bacon, Lord, 128. 
Balmes, 21, 68, 60. 
Balzac, 204. 
Being, 176 ; Real and Necessary, 63 ; 

Real and Possible, 89. 
Berkeley, 42. 126. 
Boetius, 22, 93. 

Eonald. Vte. de, 131, 147, 149, 163. 
Bonaparte. N., 200. 
Bonaventure, St., 91. 
Bossuet, 126. 
Brown, Brockden, 204. 
Brownson, 0. A., 20, 57, 66, 68, 70, 73, 

88, 93. 
Buffler, Father. 131. 
Bulwer. 204. 
Byron, 119, 203, 204. 



Caesar, Julius, 200. 

Cabanis, 210. 

Calvin, 28. 

Campanella, 123. 

Cartesian Method. 136. 

Categories, 59, 77, 176, 181, 182. 

" Catholic World, The," 67, 68. 

Causation, Idea of, 52. 

Cause, 69, 77, 112, 132, 166; C. of 

Nature, 153. 
Certainty, 58, 202. 
Channing, 102. 
Chaucer, 156. 
Cicero, 140. 
Civilization, 10. 
Clarke, J. F„ 33. 
Classification, 110. 
Clement of Alexandria, 24. 
Colenso, 172. 
Colleges, 25. 
Collier. 126, 

Comte, 43, 111, 133, 135, 214. 
Conception, 53, 54, 58. 
Concrete, 82. 

Condillac, 42, 126, 145, 209, 
Consciousness, 49, 64, 82, 125. 
Conservatives, 13. 
Contingency, 50. 
Correlatives, 49 69. 
Cousin, v., 45, 46, 55, 58, 84, 97, 122, 

133, 146, 148, 182. 
Creation. 53, 173, 180; C. of Man, 

157 ; C. of the Soul, 94, 143, 163. 
Creative Act, 63, 88, 90, 178. 
Damascen, St. John, 75. 
Dana, 204. 
Dante, 156. 
Darwin, 7, 43, 111. 
"DeCivitateDei," 11, 14 
Deduction, 125, 



218 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



deists, 56. 
Democritus, 12, 107. 
Demonstration, 81, 90, 92, U3, 181. 
Descartes, 2S, 30, 31, 40, 42, 49, 58, 62, 

123, 124, 127, 130, 136. 
Doubt, 119, 124, 203. 
Draper. 210. 

"Dublin Review, The," 72. 
Eclectics, The French, 97. 
Education, 105: Religious E., 25; 

Defect of E., 25. 
Effect, 69, 77. 
Emerson, 33, 56, 103. 
Epicurus, 12, 23, 107, 214. 
Essence, 116, 117, 169; E. of G-od, 

117, 174, 206. 
-Evolution, 110. 
-Existence of God, 76, 86, 92, 125, 141, 

177. 
-Facts, 113; not known intuitively. 

83. 
-Faith, 136, 171, lyO, lyl, 199, 205, 207, 
211; Loss of F., 140; F. and Reas- 
on, 16, 99: Their Antagonism, 16. 
-Fathers of the Church, 22, 12:3, 139. 
Fenelon, 88, 91, 126, 144. 
Fichte, 41. 
Fournier, 30. 74. 
Forces, Identity of, 37. 
Froissart, 156. 
Froschammer, 94. 
•Galileo, 67, 

Genera and Species, 61. 
•Generalizations, 38. 
Generation, 61. 
Gentile Philosophers, 53. 
Geocentric, Theory, 67. 
Gerdil, 91. 144. 
German Philosophers, 97. 
Gibbon, 213. 

■Gioberti, S3, 91, 144, 149, 178, 186. 
God, Essence of, 117, 174,206; Ex- 
istence of, 76, 86, 92, 125, 141, 177; 
Intuition of, 65, 91, 144; Veracity 
of, 99, 141, 179. 
Godwin, 204. 
'Goethe, 204. 
'Gower, 156. 



Grace, 96, 205. 

Greek Philosophers, 208. 

Greek Poets, 204. 

Gregory the Great. St., 15, 66. 

Hamilton, Sir "W., 45. 102, 114, 119, 

122, 130, 131. 
Hegel, 41, 149, 182. 
Hegelians, 12, 
Heliocentric Theory, 67. 
Helvetius, 210. 
Hobbes, 12S. 
Homoeousians, 213. 
Homoousians, 213. 
Hume, 69. 128, 131, 166. 196. 
Huxley, 7, 43, HI. 
Ideal, The, 65, 94, 144. 184. 
Ideal Formula, 79, 151, 178. 
Idealism, 42, 125. 145. 
Ideas, 60, 72, 80, 175 ; Innate, 62, 127; 

ZSTecessary, 46, 62, 144. 
Incarnation, The, 62, 214. 
Induction, 177. 
Inductive Philosophy, 85. 
Intellectus Agens, 59. 
Intelligible, The, 174, 184. 
Intelligence in Animals, 97, 109. 
Intuition, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 58, 63, 65, 

71, S6, 90, 143, 148. 152, 163, 169, 175, 

178, 184: I. of God, 65, 91, 144, 179. 
Islam, 24. 
Jefferson, Th., 133. 
Jews, 208. 
John, St., 118,171. 
Join^-ille, Sire de, 156. 
Jouflroy, Theodore. 133. 
Justin, St., 24. 
Kant, 40, 49, 60, 79, 81, 97, 122, 128, 

129, 131, 137, 166, 181, 210. 
Kleutgen, 71. 
Lalande, 210. 
Lamartine, 204. 
La Mettrie, 210. 
Language, 88, 147, 149, 164, 168; 

Unity of L , 158. 
Languages, 156. 
Law of Nature, 96, 142, 164. 
Laws of Nature, 196 
Leibnitz, 68, 80, 91. 129, 182. 



INDEX. 



219 



Leroux, 126, 147. 

Leucippus, 12, 107. 

Liebig, 111. 

Limits of Reason, 101, 107, 120. 

^Linngeus, 110. 

Littre, 111. 

Locke, 60, 128, 146. 

Logic, 79. 

Love. 103. 

Louvain Professors, 30, 74. 

Lubbock, 7. 

Lucretius, 108. 

-Lugdunensis Philosophy, 67. 

Luther, 28, 31. 

-Maistre, Cte. de, 147. 

Malebranche, 91, 126, 144. 

JMau, Creation of, 157; End of, 207. 

JMansel, 130, 131. 

-Materialism, 209. 

Methexis, 80. 

Method of Philosophy, 64. 

-Mill, J. S., 45. 

Mimesis, 80. 

Miracles, 173, 196. 

Moral Science. 207. 

Mysteries, 96, 136, 171, 175, 184, 185, 

191, 212, 214. 
Katural, The, 156, 173. 
Naturalists, 19, 211. 
-Nature, 121, 132; Cause of N. 153; 

The Law of N., 96, 142, 164 : Laws 

of N., 196; Pure N. 135, 212. 
Nescience, 120. 
Newman, 130, 131. 
■Ontologism, 29, 44, 68. 
•Ontologists,85,179. 
Orders of Science and Reality, 27. 
Origen, 24. 
Owen, 111. 
Pantheism, 31, 85. 
Pantheists, 56. 
Pascal, 131. 
Paul, St., 22, 66, 76, 117, 121, 145, 177, 

185, 204. 
Pelagians, 96. 
Percy, 161, 

Peripatetic Method, 23. 
^Peripatetics. 59, 115, 144, 181. 



Phantasmata, 59. 
Phidias, 71. 
Philologists, 157. 

Philosophy, 5, 6, 63, 122, 210 211; In- 
ductive P., 85; Method of P., 64; 

Text Books of P., 28, 44; P. of 

Religion, 27; Epicurean P., 23; 

Stoic P., 23; Thomist f., 67. 
Plato, 12, 22, 23, 73, 79, 90, 127, 137, 

166, 188, 207, 208. 
Pliny, 112, 211. 
Pomponazzi, 123. 
Porphyry, 22. 

Positivists, 15, 19, 112, 119, 136. 
Principles, 112, 135, 143, 166; P. of 

Science and Reality, 54, 84, 184; 

P. of Natural and Supernatural 

Science, 27. 
Progress, 10. 

Proposition, Self-evident, 92. 
Protagoras, 12. 
Proudhon, 16. 
Psychologism, 30, 40 44. 
Psychologists, 62, 85. 
Pyrrhonism, 119. 
Pythagoras, 23. 
Radicals, 13. 
Raleigh, 174. 
Ramiere, 71. 
Rationalism, 95, 108, 113, 120, 132. 

170. 
Rationalists, 19,100. 
Reason, 98, 198, 211; Distrust of R., 

43; Limits of R., 101, 107, 120. 
Redemption, 62. 
Reflection, 88, 148. 
Reid, 60, 116, 122, 129, 181. 
Relativity of Science, 101, 114. 
Religious Sentiment, 106. 
Reminiscence. 188. 
Representation, Sensible, 145, 149, 

164. 
Revelation, 96, 108, 137. 162, 164. 167, 

171, 185, 190, 202, 208. 
Rosmlni, 84, 91, 148, 182. 
Rothenflue. 30, 74. 
Saint-Simonian Doctrine, 15. 
Sand, Georges, 204. 



220 



FAITH AND SCIENCE. 



Scepticism, 202. 

ScWeiermacher, 188. 

Scholastics, 58, 211. 

Science, 107. 167, 170, 201. 207; 
Ground of S., 142, 168; Moral S., 
207; Materials for S„ 111; Rela- 
tivity of S., 101, 114. 

Scientists, 38, 56, 211; Labors of S., 
111. 

Scotus Erigena, 123. 

See, Ttie Holy, 71. 131,141. 

Senses, 166, 203. 

Sensible, Tlie, 107, 116, 185; S. Rep- 
resentation, 145, 149, 164. 

Sensism, 145, 209. 

Sentiment, Religious, 106. 

Shakspeare, 204. 

Shelley, 204. 

Socrates, 137, 206, 208. 

Solomon, 104. 

Solutions, 10. 

Sophia, 134. 

Sophists, 161. 

Soul, Creation ol the, 94, 143,163; 
Immateriality of the S, 141; Its 
Sense of Want, 190. 

Sovrintelligenza, 186. 

Species, 60, 61. 

Spencer, H., 12, 43, 45. 101, 107, 108, 
111, 117, 119. 

Spinoza, 55. 124, 126. 

Stoic Philosophy, 23. 

Storchenau, 68. 

Suarez, 88. 

Subjectivism, 125. 

Substance, 55, 115, 117. 



Substans, 56. 

" Sumnia Contra Gentiles," 11. 14. 

Superintelligible, 99, 104, 169, 174, 
184, 192. 

Supernatural, 121, 132, 153, 173. 

Superstition, 105. 

Symbol, 185, 193. 

Synthesis, 20, 64, 204. 

Telesio, 123. 

Testimony, 191, 201. 

Theology. 122, 200, 211. 

Thomas Aquinas, St., 11, 15, 21, 24. 
29, 39, 48, 51, 52, 54, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 
68, 69, 73, 75, 78, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 
100, 130, 142, 143. 144, 145, 164, 168, 
182, 183, 189, 198. 

Thomist Philosophy, The, 67. 

Thought, 64, 81, 114. 148. 

Topsy, 113. 

Tracy, Destutt de, 126. 

Tradition, 134. 137, 160, 164, 167. 

Traditionalists, 18. 141. 147, 163. 

Transcendentalists, 33, 187. 

Transubstantiation, 166. 

Understanding, 97. 

Unity of Language, 158. 

Unknowable, 90, 101. 

Unknown, 101, 140, 

Veracity of God, 99, 141. 

Volney, 140. 

Voltaire, 172, 213. 

Ward, 72. 

Washington, 200. 

Wisdom, 206, 

Wolff, 68, 182. 

Youths leaving College, 25. 



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